illumos gate

Illumos needs Public APIs (or a Public API) for manipulating datalink and IP configuration. The existing libdladm and libipadm libraries are inadequate as-is for a number of reasons:

1. they are Consolidation Private and required header files aren't packaged (they were never designed to be Public APIs)
2. they leak implementation details (e.g. datalink IDs)
3. they are inconsistent with the separation between UI and API (some functions take *adm CLI command-lines as arguments)
4. they don't account for versioning, extensibility, future backward compatibility, etc.
(more?)

Having such APIs (or a single API that does it all) would allow applications to manipulate networking configuration without having to resort to executing CLIs, parsing resulting output, and everything else that comes with such hacks.