> people don’t update tools because it breaks scraping. What people are you talking about? Anyone who's on a payroll is liable if they don't upgrade systems w

> people don’t update tools because it breaks scraping. What people are you talking about? Anyone who's on a payroll is liable if they don't upgrade systems when they go out of support. It doesn't happen because of someone's whims... If some individual user chooses to stick with an outdated system: it's on them, and they have no ground to stand on if they complain about it... > we’d be able to update ifconfig. No we wouldn't. "ip a" is a tiny fraction of what this command does. The reason it came to be was not that ifconfig needed replacement, but because Linux utilities are a zoo of halfbaked projects, most of which have huge flaws in their design, especially when it comes to extensibility. Did ifconfig foresee bridge interfaces, bond interfaces, vLANs etc? What about IB? What about sr-iov etc.? -- Nope, and since there wasn't a single structured and systematic tool, that could've been extended by the authors of eg. bridge drivers, they were forced to come up with their own tools, eg. brctl. iproute2 wasn't an improvement on top of ifconfig. It was an aggregation and systematization of various tools and configurations that dealt in a very partial way with various aspects of networking. There would've been no way to keep any kind of backwards compatibility with ifconfig, so there was no reason to keep the name. It's not an evolution of ifconfig, it's an entirely different thing.