I wanted to reply to this earlier but it is probably better that it took so
long and you nobody commented for a couple of days to drive my point home.
Your message is very difficult to respond to for a number of reasons:
- it's difficult to understand what you are talking about.
- you don't share any background, even though you probably have researched it.
- you don't really explain why you want to make the change.
On Fri, Jun 20, 2025 at 05:33:16PM +0000, Emmanuel Nyarko wrote:
> I am currently working on policy based routing (based on outgoing interface)
I don't understand what you want to say with that. The entire point of
routing is to chose an outgoing interface. All implementations of policy
routing that I know of are about chosing a *different* outgoing interface
than the one that would have been chosen by a "normal" lookup in the
routing table. So what does it mean to do "policy routing (based on
outgoing interface)"? Please do not talk entirely in the abstract when
explaining this but give concrete practical examples so that we can see the
practical relevance.
> there’ a previously written code for ipv6 which I’ve taken from Jonathan A.
> Kollasch long time ago.
> and he used nd6_output function which appears to be removed from netbsd.
>
> + if (IN6_IS_SCOPE_EMBEDDABLE(&dst.v6.sin6_addr))
> + dst.v6.sin6_addr.s6_addr16[1] = htons(ifp->if_index);
> +
> + if (m->m_pkthdr.len <= ifp->if_mtu) {
> + error = nd6_output(ifp, ifp, m, &dst.v6, NULL);
> + } else {
> + in6_ifstat_inc(ifp, ifs6_in_toobig);
> + icmp6_error(m, ICMP6_PACKET_TOO_BIG, 0, ifp->if_mtu);
> + }
>
> freeBSD now uses nd6_output_ifp for a similar job. and i want to import it to
> netbsd so we can use it for that.
Did you research why nd6_output has been removed? If so, it would be
prudent to include URLs to the commit message (preferably on cvsweb) and
any relevant discussions on the mailing lists. Links to nxr would be
useful too, if they better provide context.
Otherwise you make everyone who wants to comment go and research this on
their own time.
You give no reason why you want to incorporate the FreeBSD code and not
resurrect the NetBSD code? Would the old NetBSD code not be good enough?
Is it missing functionality? Is the FreeBSD code needed for other reasons?
Most of us work on NetBSD in our extremely limited spare time. Commenting
on other developers proposals and reviewing other developers code takes a
lot of time away from working on our own projects. So saving other people
time by giving relevant background is not only helpful but also respectful.
Of course, this applies to eveyone. And I'm know from personal experience
that thinking about what all the relevant context and background is takes
quite a bit of time.
--chris
