On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 16:32:08 +0200
Quentin Garnier <cube@cubidou.net> wrote:

> 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.
> 
> For some definitions of "most".
By this I meant all by one who replied to this email before you.
 
> Like for one I really don't understand the fight over this.

There is no fight. Just a suggestion/question.
I read one of emails from Sam Leffler where he wondered why we
keep this rather annoying behaviour of ifconfig and asked about it myself 
since it annoys me as well. 
I work with other open source O.Ss and the old habit of just typing ifconfig
to see avaliable interfaces bites me when working on NetBSD.

> And also you should be aware that on Linux, ifconfig != ifconfig -a.
> The former doesn't list interfaces that are not up.  Now *that's* what
> I call an annoying behaviour.

I agree. I was actually referring to FreeBSD's ifconfig. 
Linux is a totally different beast.

Cheers,
Marcin.