Re: Desired behaviour of "ifconfig -alias"

On Monday 12 February 2007 16:09, Oliver Fromme wrote:
>
> it is not misleading and it is a perfect term. With alias you add
> secondary addresses to an interface. Like secondary is probably the
> better word,

No, not at all. As soon as you use the terms "primary IP
address" and "secondary IP addresses", you imply that they
are not equal. But they are equal. It's just a list of
IP addresses assigned to an interface which happens to have
a certain order.


nobody claims that there is an master-slave order or something, alias is the
secondary in order of time, but not in value, I do not even understand why
you talking so much about this, the point is more than clear


Yes, that's why I wrote it should be changed to not contain
the word "alias" anymore, but simply an enumerated list.

> > If no IP address is specified, then it's not completely
> > nonsensical to remove the first address. In fact I've
> > used that short-cut to quickly remove the only address
> > from an interface. I've used "ifconfig xyz0 delete"
> > quite a lot.
>

yes it is! it does not matter which word, without an IP address it should NOT
remove anything

> the man page tells us that -alias removes *the* specified address and
> not the first, also the man page does not say that there is any further
> action when *no* IP address specified

That's true. Usually if something is not documented, the
behaviour is undefined.


undefined is absolutely not similar to remove something ..


> delete is according to the man page another word for -alias, that means,
> using grammatical logic that -alias is the main command,

No. It means that "delete" and "remove" are aliases for
"-alias". In reality they're simply equal. ;-)

> then according to the man
> page there is no other command as "-alias *IP*" to remove an IP address
> and -alias only should not remove anything

It's not documented that way. As I wrote above.

If something is not documented, that doesn't mean that it
shouldn't do anything at all. In that case a _lot_ of
things wouldn't work. :-)

all commands which remove something "usally" say something when trying to use
without value, rm, rmdir, rmuser ... I really do not remember any other
then -alias which does so



> you see, now you apply logic because you want to and when not not ... ;)
>
> to let it more clear what I mean, you say: "you don't tell it anything
> to add" so why the heck "ifconfig nic -alias" should remove one if I do
> not tell so?

In the case of adding something, what should be added if
nothing is specified? Should the tool invent an arbitrary
IP address and add it? Now that would be nonsensical.

But when removing something without specifying which one,
it makes some sense to simply remove the first existing
address on that interface. It would even be OK with me
to remove the last one, or an arbitrary one -- I use that
shortcut mostely when I need to remove the only address
from an interface (or all existing addresses), so it
doesn't matter.



come on, now your are looking up a way out of this mess ...


In fact, it might also make sense to enhance the syntax
to allow the specification of a number, for example
"ifconfig xyz0 delete #2" would remove the second address

my god what a horrible idea is that! do you remember "#" in UNIX????

the command "ifconfig nic -alias IP" is OK, perfect, even delete is, the
problem and the only problem is that both remove without specifying a value a
value and that *IS* wrong behaviour, otherwise *you* must agree that rm
removes the first file it finds, rmuser the first user and and and, that is
wrong, documented or not

However, such a feature will run into problems when the
set of ip addresses is not an ordered list anymore, which
might very well happen in the future. Then there will be
no "first" and "last" anymore, but instead the interface
will just have an unordered set of IP addresses. In fact
I wish that would already be the case, so people saying
"primary" and "secondary" would shut up already. :-)

then they come up in random order on each "ifconfig nic" :) ???


--

João







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