Comment 18 for bug 925145

Upstream both suggested that and declared they wanted to avoid additional dependencies ...

Reading through the launchpad project history and issues ... well ... it's not very well resourced it appears.

I don't have a platform to actively test this on, but now Facter3 is done I do have some availability to update patches and try for a push upstream...

On a side note ... forking net-tools doesn't help the issues at hand as it's fundamental problems with net-tools ... it uses the ioctl API rather than the netlink API which is why it's missing information about routing tables, IP addresses assigned and so on ...

You could re-write net-tools against the netlink API but that would be a lot of effort and would probably get minimal assistance from the network stack kernel maintainers as they already maintain iproute2 themselves ... and would probably be reluctant to maintain two things themselves for the same tasks.

You might want to review this old LWN article: https://lwn.net/Articles/710533/

There's previously been discussion of a wrapper... especially within RHEL where consistency of behaviour is critical ...

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=687920#c8

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This is a comment from the previous net-tools maintainer I found in one (private) RHEL bug, where the wrapper for 'ip' to emulate ifconfig was also discussed:
"we've already tried that but the command line options of both commands
differ significantly. In fedora most of the
scripts (initscripts/networking) has been using iproute commands now and we're
trying to teach customers to switch to ip as well. (iproute has active upstream
following kernel changes closely, immediately bringing features kernel adds
into iproute releases).

Wrapper is one option, but that would have to be properly staffed. We're
talking not only about ifconfig but as well about netstat and other tools
net-tools package is providing. All of them have their equivalents in other
packages, but unfortunately we still have customers relying on net-tools."

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On the bright side once this work to use iproute2 is complete it is going to be safer looking forwards towards RHEL8 etc.