Hacker News Reader

Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the stated reasons don't sound very compelling. Maybe in aggregate, but not individually.

But they left out one of the bigger reasons, IMHO. FreeBSD doesn't tend to churn user (admin) facing interfaces. This saves you time, because you still use ifconfig to configure interfaces, and you still use netstat to look at network statistics, etc; so you don't have to learn a new tool to do the same thing but differently every couple of years. Sure, there's three firewalls, but they're the same three firewalls since forever.

View on HN

ifconfig/netstat was deprecated more than a decade ago, that's more than a couple years don't you think?

Since it was just an example, I don't think refuting this particular item will nullify the opinion. The idea, I think, is that there are always more pieces in a state of deprecation and replacement at any given time in Linux land than in FreeBSD land.

I think that's just due to the pace of development. The BSDs are resource constrained, so they have to pick and choose what to work on. That is both a good thing and a bad thing. Here the benefit is less churn. On the downside, they're just catching the Wayland train recently. On the up side, by catching it late they didn't suffer a lot of the growing pains.

Deprecated on Linux. But I for one can’t consign them to the dustbin of my memory, because on my Mac, they are not deprecated, while the `ip` command that replaces them on Linux does not exist. With this part of macOS being derived from FreeBSD, I don’t know whether that makes FreeBSD a savior or a villain.

Personally I blame all of the major Unix-derived operating systems (Linux, macOS, BSDs), as none of them show any interest in standardizing any APIs or commands invented this millennium. The subset that’s common to all of them is frozen in time, and is slowly being replaced by new bits that aren’t. From epoll/kqueue to eBPF, containers/jails to seccomp/pledge, DBus/XPC to init systems… from low-level network configuration (ifconfig, ip) to high-level network configuration (whatever that is this month).

At first I wanted to say that while this is inconvenient, it is better for the larger ecosystem because we explore the problem space more. But the more I think of it, the more I see it as just a superficial exploration, not deep operating system research.

On Linux, the last commit on it was about a decade ago.

On FreeBSD, the last commit on it was last week.

They're not the same tool, and FreeBSD didn't abandon their core tools, because they're part of the base system.

The FreeBSD POLA design principle makes sure fundamental tools don't disappear or worse double over the years. Linux distributions differ vastly from vendor to vendor.

The last commit for the source code of ifconfig, route, et. al, for Linux was as of this writing, about six weeks ago:

https://sourceforge.net/p/net-tools/code/ci/4030929bb6f3ee6f...

It's still used in some user spaces, and the Linux kernel supports the system calls for net-tools still today, because of the Torvalds Prime Directive, "though shalt not break userspace".

wait wait they were deprecated? why on earth?

(on linux)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com