Re: Interface description support

[Edgar Fuß <ef%math.uni-bonn.de@localhost>]

> But it also occurs to me that calling it a "description" is misleading
> if it's really an alternative name.  To me, "description" would be
> something like "Inter-office VPN" or "4th floor desktops".
Yes. I was thinking about something like "VLAN 104" or "easerv" (our 
internal network name) because I always end up looking up that 
in /etc/ifconfig.vlan*.

> What's been getting discussed here I would call an "alias", though I'd 
> want to find a different word for it because ifconfig(8)'s command line 
> already has an "alias" keyword.
Well, isn't "alias" an abbreviation for "inet alias"? If so, you could use 
something like "name alias" for the new functionality.

> Really, though, this whole thing is a botch.  Berkeley created a new
> namespace for network interface names when they should have been just
> nodes in /dev, and what we're discussing here is a pseudo-ln for that
> other namespace.  The _right_ fix, it seems to me, is to move network
> interfaces into /dev (possibly in a subdirectory?), where they should
> have been all along, and then use ln, ln -s, mv, whatever, there.
Yes. But it's far too late to /move/ them, I guess.
Couldn't that be done via a pseudo-filesystem (which you could mount to
/dev/net) or a part of kernfs (which you could symlink to /dev/net) where 
a rm /dev/net/vlan7 would be equivalent to ifconfig vlan7 destroy, a 
ln /dev/net/extnet3 /dev/net/vlan7 would make "extnet3" an alias name for 
vlan7 and ln -s "external net to firewall" /dev/net/vlan7 would make that 
an interface description for vlan7?