[illumos-Developer] making -a default for ifconfig?

[Alexey Zaytsev]

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 02:33, Joshua M. Clulow <josh at sysmgr.org> wrote:
> On 30 May 2011 08:18, Bayard Bell <buffer.g.overflow at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Because you've got it backwards from where I'm standing. If the reliable way to get "ifconfig -a" output across platforms is to type "ifconfig -a", that's what most people are going to learn, unless maybe they think of Unix as being the implementation they use and nothing else. I'd honestly expect that most Illumos users are more ecumenical than that. If you have an environment where you want the same thing across platforms, you'll know that all the platform aren't imminently going to make "-a" the default behaviour, so you'll use environment changes which can be made to work across platforms instead. Given this is one of those things where it's faster to type three characters than it is to remember which platform does or doesn't need those three characters, it's not fixed if you can't take it with you.
>
> Which modern UNIX platforms don't currently have "-a" as the default
> behaviour?  Certainly the Linux, BSD and Mac OS hosts I have available
> all report a list of configured interfaces with no arguments to
> ifconfig.  This is a small change to get on board with what appears at
> this point to be convention, rather than to continue to require people
> who want uniformity to privately maintain libraries of shell glue.
>

NetBSD still needs -a. But this is totally irrelevant. Even if every
other platform would require -a, what would be different? We could
still behave sanely, and the other platforms could do whatever they
want.