I tried to resist jumping in here, but I guess it's time...
1. Protocol independance is an extremely rare ideal (I
would not call it a myth precisely). Having ported a bunch
of simple and complex application, I can say now that only
about 5% of them were really protocol independent. Most
apps do all sorts of loging, setting socket options, etc...
that is really difficult to not have even one
if (af == AF_INET)
...
else if (af == AF_INET6)
....
If you have even one of these, you loose protocol independence,
so the ideal goes out the window.
2. All the talk about specifying bind() constraints should not
be specified in RFC. It may be considered as an Appendix, but it
is very difficult to get all of the behavior from all different systems.
Jinmey's collection of results from the bind test program Kame guys
have created shows a lot of different way of doing this. Documenting
this would be nightmare.
3. As Tim already pointed out, changing polarity of V6ONLY would
break some things. A quick glance through my code shows at lest 10 apps
that would have to be ported again (for the 5th time). As an implementor,
NO THANKS.
I am in the camp of people who think the currenlty specified
behavior should be kept. It works and allows flexibility to
try for protocol independence (which will be hard to achieve in
complex applications even if polarity of V6ONLY changes).
I personally prefere a single socket approach to writing apps.
-vlad
P.S.
I have actually once implemented once the 0.0.0.0 and :: on the
same port without any socket options. This worked for a while
untill we put a load on the system though port-trollers. This
cause all sort of havok as these port-torllers started stealing
traffic from applications that did not have 2 sockets and expected
V4 traffic on V6 wildcard. I don't know if anyone else has
seen this.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Vladislav Yasevich Tel: (603) 884-1079
Compaq Computer Corp. Fax: (435) 514-6884
110 Spit Brook Rd ZK03-3/T07
Nashua, NH 03062
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
