Item — HN Reader

> Why is this new syntax worse?

The question is, how is it better? When you have something that works, replacing it with something that's just not worse is unnecessary churn and work for everyone. It shouldn't be replaced unless its replacement is somehow better.

> It also supports newer functionality like net namespaces, and uses newer kernel interfaces.

Why couldn't these have just been added to ifconfig? Surely it could have been ported to the new kernel interfaces. As for features like net namespaces, the syntax should have been added in a backwards-compatible way instead of rewriting it all.

2 comments

You could ask the same questions about any user interface change. Surely you can just kept grafting new limbs onto existing bodies, but a command like ip actually does make sense when you look at the breadth of things jammed into the new command structure.

The article we’re talking about questions what “progress” is and points out things that actually have serious advantages, often technical in some regard, but then disregards those advantages and talks about minor inconveniences like 70 MB disk space footprints and a couple new commands to remember.

Show me two IP addresses on one interface with ifconfig. No, alias interfaces do not count.

I acknowledge that that's a limitation of ifconfig today. My point was that we should have just modified ifconfig instead of completely replacing it with an incompatible new tool.

The "we" who did the work didn't consider that a good route, and wanted to create something much more powerful.