Hi, On Mon, May 12, 2025 at 09:13:14AM +0200, Simon Josefsson via Bug reports for the GNU Internet utilities wrote: > Collin Funk <collin.fu...@gmail.com> writes: > > [...] > > I wouldn't mind having 'ping' support both IPv4 and IPv6 with arguments > > to chose though. I think that was even but in the TODO file long ago. > > But I am in no rush to do so. > [...] > I disagree with Anna and think that IPv4 should still be the default, > although I think we should be open to revisit this in a few years if > IPv4 availability lowers (which I'm not seeing any signs of).
The iputils ping program (the default ping on Debian GNU/Linux and derived distributions) combines IPv4 and IPv6 support in a single binary for many years now. As commonly expected from dual-stack applications, it prefers IPv6 if both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are returned by getaddrinfo(). Another free software dual-stack ping program would be fping, also preferring IPv6, also using getaddrinfo(). The dual-stack applications that are currently part of GNU Inetutils also prefer IPv6. The proprietary dual-stack ping implementation on Windows also prefers IPv6. It seems to me that diverging from this common behavior in a dual-stack ping implementation would be rather surprising. As such I'd prefer a combined ping+ping6 implementation, i.e., a possible future dual-stack GNU Inetutils ping, to prefer IPv6. > Even if we merge the IPv6 functionality into 'ping', I still > think we should install a 'ping6' symlink because that interface is > worth supporting too (for Anna's use-case, for example). A "ping6" symlink seems to be common, it helps to keep existing scripts working without changes. Cheers, Erik
