A declaração oficial sobre os planos para ferramentas de rede obsoletas foi feita no lista de discussão da debian-devel no início de 2009 por um dos mantenedores da net-tools. Fiel à sua afirmação, as net-tools quase nunca foram mantidas desde então.
Luk Claes and me, as the current maintainers of net-tools, we've been thinking about it's future. Net-tools has been a core part of Debian and any other linux based distro for many years, but it's showing its age.
It doesnt support many of the modern features of the linux kernel, the interface is far from optimal and difficult to use in automatisation, and also, it hasn't got much love in the last years.
On the other side, the iproute suite, introduced around the 2.2 kernel line, has both a much better and consistent interface, is more powerful, and is almost ten years old, so nobody would say it's untested.
Hence, our plans are to replace net-tools completely with iproute, maybe leading the route for other distributions to follow. Of course, most people and tools use and remember the venerable old interface, so the first step would be to write wrappers, trying to be compatible with net-tools.
At the same time, we believe that most packages using net-tools should be patched to use iproute instead, while others can continue using the wrappers for some time. The ifupdown package is obviously the first candidate, but it seems that a version using iproute has been available in experimental since 2007.
A idéia de escrever wrappers acabou sendo abandonada como impraticável, e quase todas as distribuições Linux mudaram para o iproute2 desde então.