> And the reason is that it was unmaintained, not that it couldn't handle multiple IP addresses. Unmaintained sounds like a very good reason to me. It's not j

> And the reason is that it was unmaintained, not that it couldn't handle multiple IP addresses. Unmaintained sounds like a very good reason to me. It's not just whether there is 1 or 2 addresses per interface. The rot set in when Alexy re-did the Linux kernels network infrastructure back god knows when (its decades ago now), and wrote his own user space tool to configure it. That tool was ip. It not only handled multi ip addresses per interface - it handled multiple routing tables, multiple link types, routing rules and a whole pile of other things. And that single tool has been growing ever since - it's now huge. Type typing "man ip-<tab><tab>" on a cli that supports tab completion some time. Effectively the task of keeping up with the kernel's new features kept growing and at some point the ifconfig maintainers gave up. It was all over bar the shouting at the point. The only surprising thing is the shouting has gone on for literally decades, and as this article demonstrates continues to this day. Lets hope the same angst over systemd doesn't continue for the same amount of time. Just like like systemd there are things that rub me the wrong way of course. Coping the Cisco IOS style of command line usage rather than using the Linux style is for me one of those things. But it happened for a reason - Alexy set the standard when he wrote the first version of ip, and he was trying to emulate the features provided by a Cisco router at the time.