Bryan Ford wrote:
You seem to be assuming that my proposal was to disallow such
"visibility into the network" entirely, but that wasn't my intent at
all. I just would like it to become no longer _mandatory_ for every
application to know about the structure IP addresses in order to
accomplish anything.
In short, I don't think either the current fascist extreme of an
"IP-address-only API" or the opposite fascist extreme of a
"DNS-name-only protocol stack" is very appealing; we need an environment
in which different kinds of names/addresses/identities can coexist.
Ah, it seems I read far too much into what you wrote earlier. I
certainly don't think it should be mandatory for all applications that
use the network to know about the structure of IP addresses. The beef I
had was with the various forms of "all apps should always use DNS names"
arguments.
Note that with getaddrinfo(), arguably they _don't_ need to know about
the structure of IP addresses. The getaddrinfo() routine allocates a
sockaddr_xx structure of appropriate type for each address found, but
the pointers returned are (as far as the caller knows) to generic
sockaddr structures. The caller can simply pass a pointer to this
structure to connect(). And the idea was clearly to insulate apps from
having to know about the structure or size of addresses, without
compromising their flexibility. For several reasons, I don't happen to
think that the result works very well, but the intent was there. If it
turns out to not work well enough to prevent apps from needing to peek
into addresses, maybe the problem isn't the API, but rather that there
are subtle differences between v4 and v6 that nevertheless matter to
applications.
Keith
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