Proposal: removing net-tools from ubuntu-minimal in 17.04

[Dustin Kirkland]

On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 12:27 PM, Steve Langasek
<steve.langasek at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Starting last month, Debian has been discussing dropping net-tools[1], which
> prompted me to review its status in Ubuntu.  This package, which provides
> various commands like ifconfig and netstat, is currently part of
> ubuntu-minimal.  However, the tools in this package are largely considered
> superseded by iproute2, providing 'ip' and 'ss' tools that interface much
> better with modern kernels.  And iproute2 is also part of ubuntu-minimal.
>
> Is there a reason to keep net-tools in ubuntu-minimal, or should we remove
> it from the minimal set for 17.04?  Packages / flavors that want it can
> still depend on it (which they should technically already be doing anyway).

I'm +1 on dropping net-tools from ubuntu-minimal, as long as we keep
it in the ubuntu-server seed.  There are lots of user scripts and
tools that awk and grep their way around ifconfig output, that we
should be careful not to break, in the default Ubuntu experience.
But, I agree that the minimal Ubuntu image can certainly get by with
just /sbin/ip.

Thanks,
Dustin