Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 03:51:47PM CEST, linville@tuxdriver.com wrote:

On Sun, Jun 26, 2016 at 06:11:41PM +0200, Ben Hutchings wrote:

quoted

I've become steadily less enthusiastic and less responsive as a
maintainer over the past year or so.  I no longer work on networking
regularly, so it takes a lot more time to get into the right state of
mind to think about ethtool code, while I have other demands on my time
that tend to take priority.

So, I would like to find a new maintainer to take over as soon as
possible.  Ideally the new maintainer would have previous contributions
to ethtool and an existing account on kernel.org so that they can push
to the git repository and the home page.  But neither of those is
essential.  Please reply if you're interested.

I would like to take this responsibility. My previous contributions
to ethtool are meager, but I think my skills and interests are suited
to the task.  Plus, I already have a kernel.org account... :-)

quoted

I was thinking of adding a TODO file to the repository, but it's really
for the new maintainer to decide what to do.  So here's my list as a
suggestion:

* Add regression test coverage for all sub-commands with complex logic

* Internationalise output and error messages

* Build a libethtool that handles all the API quirks and fallbacks for
  old kernel versions.  This might help people writing language
  bindings or other utilities that use the ethtool API.

* Provide a 'cleaned up' ethtool (under some other name) that has:
  - More conventional sub-command syntax, i.e. no '-'/'--' prefix
  - More consistent output formatting

That seems like a reasonable start for a TODO list. I'll bet there
are a few people out there with other suggestions as well...?

Before that, I would like to see ethtool migrate to use generic
netlink. Then, the new tool would be needed anyway, should exist within
iproute2 package and have similar command line syntax.

I have some ideas about the gennetlink ethtool, have to find some time
to implement some initial part of it.