> OpenBSD is about very gradual evolution, not revolution. To make a concrete example, look at ifconfig and ip (from iproute2 I guess?) on Linux. ifconfig was

> OpenBSD is about very gradual evolution, not revolution. To make a concrete example, look at ifconfig and ip (from iproute2 I guess?) on Linux. ifconfig was used to be the one tool to rule them all, everybody knew it, everybody used it. At some point somebody decided they need a new tool, so now there are two, and the other is said to be deprecated. The fun thing is that ifconfig still mostly works, and you find lots of documentation/tutorials/wikis telling you to use it. But at some point you might bump into some really weird issue which turns out to be because the tool you're using is.. well, deprecated. I did have such a problem myself (related to IPv6, years ago) and it wasn't much fun, because the tool looked like it's got support for the thing I was trying to do, but it would just silently and weirdly fail... In the OpenBSD land, a network interface is a network interface. You use ifconfig. IPv6 or not. Wireless or not. The same tool everybody knew has been evolved to support the new stuff. The developers are careful about needlessly changing the user facing part of a tool in a way that would require him to re-learn it or another tool. Of course, sometimes changes are inevitable, and these changes are usually documented in the upgrade guide (and the page which documents changes to the -current branch). So there are few surprises. Sometimes the underlying tool might change entirely to another implementation, yet the user facing parts are made for most part finger-compatible with the old tool. For example, mandoc(1) has replaced historical tools like man(1), apropos(1), etc. And sendmail has been replaced by smtpd, but smtpd still provides newaliases and makemap. So they don't push shiny new poorly tested tools and tell everyone to relearn everything all the time because shiny new features (and the old tool was cranky and nobody wanted to fix it).