Re: ifconfig(8) - a tale of two states

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> Is this inconsistent?  I don't know enough about 802.11, but it
>> seems plausible, at least, to me that the radio could be on (media
>> active) without the interface having an SSID [...]

> With ethernet, it's not really that interesting if we are up but have
> no peer, and it's not complicated.  [...]

> Another point is that "link state" only really conceptually applies
> to a technology where there is a single peer and there is a notion of
> having a PHY connection to it.

How does this apply to 10base2 or 10base5?  What is the "single peer"
when what you have is a connection to a shared cable?  If anything,
802.11 is in that respect closer to 10base5 than to 10baseT, in that
it's fundamentally a shared medium.  It's just that the layers above
the fundamental physical layer are very, very different.

The relevance here, I think is that if you're going to try to keep
802.11 and Ethernet to a common framework, it needs to handle Ethernet
as well as 802.11, and Ethernet is a peculiar beast nowadays - it is
conceptually a shared medium, but recent implementations of it are
fundamentally interconnected-star topologies rather than bus
topologies, with a bus-topology fiction built atop the star reality.

But unless you want to completely desupport 10base2 and 10base5
interfaces, you need to continue to support bus topologies.

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