Re: [PATCH 1/3] net: Make interface aliases available for general usage

On Sun, 11 Jan 2015 21:52:49 +0100
Richard Weinberger [off-list ref] wrote:

Allow interface aliases to be used as regular interfaces.
Such that a command sequence like this one works:
$ ip l set eth0 alias internet
$ ip a s internet
$ tcpdump -n -i internet

Signed-off-by: Richard Weinberger <richard@nod.at>

There is already a ifalias and it is used by SNMP.
But the common practice is to put longer descriptive names which aren't going
to be usable and there is no requirement that they be unique.

I think you can't do this without breaking some of our users.