Hi Simon,
Simon Josefsson <si...@josefsson.org> writes:
> Thank you for reverting, and I hope it won't deter you from proposing
> and suggesting other fixes for InetUtils! I think it is fine to install
> things, we can always revert stuff. How to approach man pages seems to
> be an endless source of considerations.
No need to worry about deterring me contributing. I would have not pushed
and submitted the patch for the mailing list for discussion first, but
had misapproximated possible objections to the change. :P
Currently, I hope to find the time for 2 things for Inetutils:
First, improving the test-suite using Gnulib's tests/init.sh like many
GNU projects (Coreutils is a good example). Currently, Inetutils will
skip many tests if a 'mkdtemp' program does not exist. So outside of
newer BSD systems and systems with Coreutils, functionally isn't tested.
Gnulib's tests/init.sh provides a portable version of that command and
provides some other things that will make improving the test suite
easier.
Second, improving IPv6 support. For a small example:
$ find . -name '*.c' | xargs grep inet_ntoa | wc -l
37
The inet_ntoa function was removed in POSIX-1.2024. But more importantly
it can only handle IPv4 address unlike inet_ntop.
Another example is ifconfig which needs an inet6 addr field:
$ ./ifconfig/ifconfig lo
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1
RX packets:5554 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5554 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:640620 TX bytes:640620
$ ip address show lo
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group
default qlen 1000
link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
inet6 ::1/128 scope host noprefixroute
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
> Btw, doesn't it work to install help2man before building InetUtils from
> git on FreeBSD? Seems like it should be relatively simple to install it
> first (wget+tar+configure+make-install), but I don't know GitHub CI.
It would make sense. FreeBSD works fine since help2man must have been
installed as a transitive dependency from some other package [1]. On
OpenBSD where there isn't a port for help2man, I will do as you suggest.
Agreed, shouldn't be too hard.
Collin
[1] https://www.freshports.org/misc/help2man/
