Comment 2 for bug 909190

Why are you filing a bug against iproute when you're clearly not using it?

Could you please explain to me how you expected ifconfig to work? (because what you demonstrated here is exactly what I expected and how it's been behaving since before CIDR was invented)...
If you expect networking tools that behaves more sanely and up to date with todays networking standard I'd suggest you to stop using net-tools which has been deprecated for about ten years and use iproute instead!