| 	  it is, IMHO, confusing (and i got comments from others, including
| 	  jinmei - cc'ed).  is it okay to always print aliases, and say
| 	  good bye to -A? (i.e. -A is the default behavior)

A long time ago I asked why we have the current behavior.
I was told that some people had hosts with hundreds of alias addresses
(web servers, etc.), and that they desired "ifconfig -a" to produce
reasonably scalable output.

I am really unsure that this change is wise.

It might be important to provide a way to not list aliases.
But maybe not?

--jhawk