The iproute package should have several configuration files included. By
default, ip looks for files in /etc/iproute2.

The files in /etc/iproute2 are pretty important, because one can define
(for instance) a name for a rule. This is much more human readable.

Example: in /etc/iproute2/rt_tables I can put a line like

16	tunnel.otherisp

in order to make a source routing with other next hops, and then do
something like

ip route show table tunnel.otherisp

instead of the more insipid
ip route show table 16

I guess adding the config files (they are included in Alexei's iproute2
packages) is not difficult, and improves a lot the package.