Hi, some days ago I posted a question where I was wondering why the RI calls all their network stuff with AF_INET6 even if the user explicitly wants to do IPv4-only stuff.
I think I found the reason and am here to ask for going the same route in GNU Classpath. Let me try to explain the situation: When a new socket is created the native code will currently call socket(AF_INET, ...) at some place. Usually the user then configures the socket and binds it to a specific inet address. Not until this binding operation is started we know whether the user wants an IPv4 socket or an IPv6 one. However the current implementation has decided this already and it is AF_INET (== IPv4). Consequently stuff like connecting to IPv6 servers fails. For multicast sockets the situation is even more worse: If you do a 'new MulticastSocket()' the socket is created as AF_INET and is bound automatically to the IPv4 ANY_ADDR. Doing a joinGroup()/leaveGroup() with an IPv6 address is quite pointless. What I am proposing is that we do all our native interaction as if the addresses where IPv6. As IP4v is a subset of IPv6 there should be no problem: Prepend 12 zeros before an IP4v address and you're done. But what about the platforms that do not natively support IPv6? Bad luck, they have to use a little hack: Skip the first 12 bytes in a buffer containing an address and call the system function with AF_INET instead. Additionally they have to adjust VMPlainSocketImpl's methods to throw some error when someone passes an Inet6Address to them. Questions, opinions, suggestions? cya Robert
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