Re: inetutils

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > You've been sending a load of patches! Happy to see that.  We will
   > need an copyright assignment, since this is well over 20 lines, would
   > you like to sign one for inetutils?

   Sure, it's on the way. You are on CC.

Thank you, I'm forwarding your message to bug-inetutils@ -- I hope you
don't mind, but you raise some very good discussion points.

   BTW, is GNU inetutils still of any value ? I see all the tools and
   daemons have been rewritten outside of GNU, at least on my Debian
   installations.

You raise a very valid point, I think there is still some usefulness
in the GNU network utlities in its current form -- many distributions
are dropping telnet/telnetd, ftp/ftpd, etc, and other protocols that
can be a bit tricky to setup with encryption.  And I think most people
have switched to ssh/scp/sftp as the only thing for file transfer and
remote access.

So there is one side of me (the one who likes to keep old iron
running) that would like to see the old protocols to live on and be
maintained, and any missing "old" protocols should be added.  For
example, gopher/d or finger/d.

What might be more interesting is to see into the future, what other
tools should we provide? What network tools should we add?

I still think that GNU ifconfig is the most sensible ifconfig, and am
immensly disapointed with how GNU/Linux has gone over to the ip tool
-- same with the route command.  I also still get annoyed when I
encounter the non-GNU ping ...

What do people think about the future of inetutils?

   Also, the code seems to very buggy - my findings were triggered just by
   warnings from 'gcc -Wall -Wextra'. I didn't even take a closer look into
   the sources. Not even talking about test code coverage and fuzzing.

Some of the code was ported from BSD 4.4-lite or something, and then
has been tweaked and tuned.  Some tools are written from scratch, and
they tend to be less buggy.  

   Did you consider C99 or are there good reasons to keep with C89 ? (e.g.
   even gnulib moved to C99 recently).

I can see the worth in switching to C99, but I know that Mats Erik
Andersson uses Solaris, and I don't know what the state of C99 support
is there.