netdev - UX: ip netns, ip route del [...] is tedious

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Date:   Sat, 10 Apr 2021 01:32:12 +0200
From:   deliciouslytyped@...lambda.systems
To:     netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: UX: ip netns, ip route del [...] is tedious

Hello list,

1)
`ip netns` requires network namespaces to be symlinked in /var/run/netns to be recognized.

Several containerization tools seem to omit that, and besides, the system appears to have no obligation to maintain those symlinks. This means `ip netns` is not useful at best, misleading at worst.

Tools like `lsns` _appear_ (from a quick strace) to just enumerate by scanning through the /proc directories, but perhaps there are better options.

I would like to request that `ip netns` be modified to do it's own network namespace enumeration, so that it's possible to get an actually representative view of the system from this intuitive-seeming subcommand.

2)
With regards to `ip route del`, copy/pasting, or typing out the full/most of a network route, to delete it, is a bit tedious and annoying. Could `ip route (show)` not return an indexed list, or somesuch? - and allow that index be passed to to `ip route del`?

This naive solution may be bad, in that it allows things like race conditions between the routing table being changed, and doing the actual deletion. Perhaps there are better ways to implement something similar? 

The current implementation, with regards to similar issues at most (?: I'm not intimately familiar with iproute2) allows "misdeleting" a rule with a matching prefix.

Regards,