Bug#1088739: colors make ip's output unreadable

[Harald Dunkel]

Package: iproute2
Version: 6.12.0-1

Blue on a black background is as impossible to read as yellow on
white. Obviously it is not reasonable to modify the foreground
color without taking the background color into accout. Could you
please make sure ip and the other tools in iproute2 produce a
readable output *by default*?

AFAIU upstream's default is COLOR_OPT_NEVER, see commit
c31fd80a2268c0b1b77e1d65827003a2327315b8 . Sounds reasonable to
me.


Thank you very much
Harri

[Luca Boccassi]

Control: tags -1 wontfix
Control: close -1

Post by Harald Dunkel
Package: iproute2
Version: 6.12.0-1
Blue on a black background is as impossible to read as yellow on
white. Obviously it is not reasonable to modify the foreground
color without taking the background color into accout. Could you
please make sure ip and the other tools in iproute2 produce a
readable output *by default*?

See the manpage, you can set COLORFGBG in your shell profile according
to your configuration.
There are no patches or color choices downstream, it's just what
upstream provides, so if you don't like their choice of a default,
please bring it up upstream, we will not carry out-of-tree patches to
customise something like this for one particular user, sorry.

See:

https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/E1s9rpA-00000006Jy7-***@ws2.gedalya.net/
https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/173e0ec8-583a-4d5a-931f-***@gedalya.net/

Feel free to chime in those discussions.

Post by Harald Dunkel
AFAIU upstream's default is COLOR_OPT_NEVER, see commit
c31fd80a2268c0b1b77e1d65827003a2327315b8 . Sounds reasonable to
me.

It sounds unreasonable to me, I like having colors in the output, it
makes it so much more readable. This is quite literally bike shedding.

[Bastian Blank]

Control: tags -1 - wontfix
Control: reopen -1

Hi Luca

Post by Luca Boccassi
See the manpage, you can set COLORFGBG in your shell profile according
to your configuration.
There are no patches or color choices downstream, it's just what
upstream provides, so if you don't like their choice of a default,
please bring it up upstream, we will not carry out-of-tree patches to
customise something like this for one particular user, sorry.

The rest of the Debian Kernel team, which is maintainer of this package,
talked about this and came ot the following conclusion: this bug nees to
be fixed.[1]

Enabling colors by default is a deviation from upstream. Debian also
does not enable colors by default in other low level tools like ls or
grep. In some cases, colors are enabled in default bash configs.

So please either
- restore the upstream default of color disabled by default, or
- use a better usable color scheme (yes, I know this is hard with how
colors work on usual termionals).

Bastian

[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/meetings/-/wikis/20241218#minutes