Peter Memishian wrote:
> Is space-saving an issue? If not, using sockaddr_storage would allow us
> to introduce a set of shared convenience routines and debug routines to do
> comparisons and other operations, which would be a nice benefit.
Space may not be an issue here. But if you are talking about
using it generally, I guess it can be an issue in other cases.
What convenience routines are you referring to? For example,
do you mean a routine to compare two socket addresses? Then
I guess that the routine will need to be do comparison on all
the necessary fields. But if a caller just uses sockaddr_storage
to store an IP address and wants to use the aforementioned
compare routine, then I guess it will need to do some unnecessary
initialization to make it work. Or is there a special family type
to indicate IP address only in a sockaddr_storage?
> FWIW, this issue came up during the networking API talks a few of us were
> involved in several weeks back, and I took an AI to document a best
> practice here, so I'm interested in perspectives on this.
To me, those sockaddr_* structs are used to store socket
address. Generalizing them to be used to store things like
single IP address seems not to be appropriate. If we want
to have common routines for IP address manipulation, we can
create a struct for storing all types (for now v4 and v6) IP
address, instead of using sockaddr_storage. Just an idea.
--
K. Poon.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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