@Jeremy

Many thanks for the useful feedback.

Yay, necro.

Not maintained means “not maintained” and nothing more, it is a probably net state of something that has worked fine for years, or decades, and doesn’t have any known bugs. That doesn’t make it automatically insecure or dangerous as the article author suggests, merely an unknown and potential risk at worst.

Honestly, I’m not sure why unmaintained software should necessarily lead to a whole new suite and renaming/removing a bunch of standard commands forcing everybody under the sun to relearn things they already know. They could have chosen to become the maintainers of net-tools and updated them OR they could at least have retained the syntax and a rough similarity in the naming.

@Daves

You have shared the same sentiment as the other readers below, but from an experienced and well explained view. Many thanks for the feedback.

I was at a UNIX developers conference in 1995. Most of the folks there were BSD UNIX folks, but there were a few early Linux folks there too. One of the guys was giving an overview of Linux when he showed the “routes” command, which essentially did that “netstat -rn” does.

When one of the folks at the conference asked why he did not use netstat to do that, the Linux guy asked what netstat was. The whole room broke up laughing. Needless to say, it did not help Linux’s reputation on that day.

Five years later, the “routes” command was gone from Linux and netstat was everywhere. I predict that this “ip” command they are pushing is going to meet the same ugly fate that the “routes” command met in the late 90’s. Change for change sake serves no practical purpose.

The issue is that you do not have a maintainer for net-tools. What makes you think you will have a maintainer for these new ip tools down the road? The problem is with maintaining a set of tools. Solve that, and you fix the problem. Why netstat, route, ifconfig, arp, ping, traceroute, and others are not currently a standard part of the Linux network kernel is baffling.

@Zamana

These tools are just considered obsolete, because the net-tools package has not been maintained for a so many years.