hi francis,
let me try a non-technical response to define the complexity.
in this community folks like you, tim, carl, erik, jack, itojun,
etc. are like the gods of network programming and even muck around in OS
internals with network subsytems and some even change paradigms that
have worked for 15 years on the internet in our code bases. these folks
also understand the work of Dr. Richard Stevens and Turing machines,
etc....
but there is a whole class of "programmer" that builds applications
which the end user really sees and the real reason people buy computers
that do networking. there job is to ship user space code that people
will pay for to do a business function. They are usually called
"application" programmers and we are the "systems programmers".
the basic API was written for the "applications programmers". tim's
comment on select() I agree with. the select() or poll() sys call is
not intuitive to an application programmer that now has to re-write
their application server for 10,000+ connections because of the Internet
explosion when they wrote it for about 100 connections and might have
not even used select or poll.
part of our job here is to keep the "BASIC" API as simple as possible
and now BACKWARDS compatible for the application programmer who will
port their apps to IPv6. Its a human thing not just a technical thing.
I am not saying not fix parts that need to be addressed like the issue
of multicast IF.
I will say that after this next release of the Basic API we are done.
It will got to XNET/POSIX and then either some of the stuff I am hearing
in here goes to the Advanced API or to another API we may need for QOS,
IPSEC, whatever...But we must live with the next update for good.
The basic API cannot be a moving target for developers porting to IPv6.
regards,
/jim
--------------------------------------------------------------------
IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List
IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng
FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng
Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
