Linux – Where is the statement of deprecation of ifconfig (on linux)

ifconfigiproute2linuxnetworking

A lot of people is stating that the ifconfig command is deprecated in favor of the ipone (on linux at least).

This is often used as an argumentation to switch from ifconfig to ip (see some comment and answer of Should I quit using Ifconfig?).

Where can we find a statement about that (i.e. where is it stated that ifconfig won't be supported in the future) ?

Best Answer

The official statement regarding the plans to obsolete net-tools was made on the debian-devel mailing list in early 2009 by one of the net-tools maintainers. True to their statement, net-tools has been hardly maintained at all since that time.

Luk Claes and me, as the current maintainers of net-tools, we've been thinking about it's future. Net-tools has been a core part of Debian and any other linux based distro for many years, but it's showing its age.

It doesnt support many of the modern features of the linux kernel, the interface is far from optimal and difficult to use in automatisation, and also, it hasn't got much love in the last years.

On the other side, the iproute suite, introduced around the 2.2 kernel line, has both a much better and consistent interface, is more powerful, and is almost ten years old, so nobody would say it's untested.

Hence, our plans are to replace net-tools completely with iproute, maybe leading the route for other distributions to follow. Of course, most people and tools use and remember the venerable old interface, so the first step would be to write wrappers, trying to be compatible with net-tools.

At the same time, we believe that most packages using net-tools should be patched to use iproute instead, while others can continue using the wrappers for some time. The ifupdown package is obviously the first candidate, but it seems that a version using iproute has been available in experimental since 2007.

The idea to write wrappers was eventually abandoned as unworkable, and nearly all Linux distributions have switched to iproute2 since then.

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