On (10/29/08 12:02), Kacheong Poon wrote: > > 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?
The drawback of sockaddr_storage are that it has space for things like sin_port in it, which may not be useful in all cases. But most system call data (e.g., lifreq) are using sockaddr_storage, so they are handy to pass around. If we choose to have a general address storage structure, we should make it shareable across all the libraries, instead of reinventing this with each library. --Sowmini _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
