On Sat, Mar 25, 2006 at 04:31:29PM +0000, Marcin Jessa wrote:
> The thing is most people seem to want to be able to replace 
> the old behaviour of ifconfig which requires -a flag to list all the devices
> with just ifconfig as on most of the other open source operating systems.

"most people" ?  "most of the other open source operating systems" ?

I've never noticed others behaving that way, but I usually give the
'-a' if I want 'all' interfaces and only use 'ifconfig' to get the usage.

Does it really make things that much better?  'ifconfig' without
any arguments tells you about -a.  The man page describes it (although
I would kind of like to see the switches described earlier in that
man page).

Do you think 'ifconfig' should default to 'ifconfig -a -u' or 'ifconfig
-a -d' or just 'ifconfig -a' ?

> Is there any reason we still keep this rather annoying behaviour and what
> do you guys think about this change?

Why is it so annoying?  I'm not trying to be obstructionist.  I'm
genuinely curious why the current behavior is annoying and why the
alternate behavior is really better.

-allen

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