itojun@iijlab.net writes:
> 	/etc/netstart can parse /etc/ifaliases and $ifaliases_ifname.
> 	The parsing code in /etc/netstart is hardcoded to IPv4 (I mean,
> 	use of "inet").  Isn't it more correct to let user specify the address
> 	family portion?  I would like to allow "inet6" at least.
> 	It would be nice if we can say "prefixlen" instead of "netmask".
> 
> 	I admit there will be backward compatibility issue in
> 	$ifaliases_ifname case (because it chops the string into tokens
> 	and use every two pairs as argument).  Let me know this should be
> 	modified.  $ifaliases6_ifname is not nice...

how hard is it to determine if it's an ipv6 vs ipv4 address?  i suppose
that doesn't help you're using names instead of addresses.

it's a shame that /etc/ifaliases wasn't as flexible as the /etc/ifconfig.XXX
format.

how about supporting /etc/ifaliases.XXX, with syntax of
	family aliasaddress [optional parameters]
where optional parameters includes netmask, prefixlen, etc...

that doesn't help on the variable side (e.g $ifalias_XXX). however,
since you may have a number of aliases per interface, it would make
it tricky to support a variable number of args *and* multiple aliases
per interface in the one shell variable, so don't try and support
extending the $if* syntax in your rework.