Re: new options for ifconfig

[Melinda Shore <shore@panix.com>]

> Adding stuff for lazy people is just a waste of time.

Adding stuff for lazy people attracts lazy people.

The problem with the portability argument is that if this
modification is added to the OpenBSD ifconfig it will only
provide "portability" among OpenBSD installations, and
that's really not what the word portability means.  Using
awk or another text filter will provide the same level of
portability.

The more disturbing problem is one that's been alluded to by
several people, and that is that the tendency to bloat code
by adding large numbers of options to do functions that are
already provided by other tools indicates that the author
doesn't understand Unix in some fundamental way.  This,
unfortunately, is an increasingly wide-spread problem, and
to a large extent I blame the "Windows sucks" movement.  

The idea of providing a few simple abstractions that hang
together well was a very good one and fundamental to Unix's
success.  Some of those abstractions include pipes, file
descriptors, and files as unstructured streams of bytes.
There's not much you can't do with an out-of-the box Unix
system if you understand the abstractions.  Failing to
understand those abstractions causes programmers to chip
away at the basic model and drift, not towards Linux (which
is a long-lost cause), but towards Windows, where an
overload of unnecessary features has created an insecure and
highly unstable platform.

Melinda