Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Thu, 21 Nov 1996 13:08:39 +0100 (MET) | From | Janos Farkas <> | Subject | Re: IPv6 and the "average user" |
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On 20 Nov 1996, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Quite true, but the IPv6 address space is expected to be exhausted in > 30 years. The switch from IPv4 to IPv6 is going to be painful, but > that is nothing compared to what switching standard protocol stacks in > the late 2020's would be like...!
Which brings up a question; could we make a framework, which could allow changing protocols under applications, without recompiling? I.e. currently to change an application to support IPv6 we need to hack around, and change socket(AF_INET,..) into a conditional socket(AF_INET6,..) and changing the resolver calls to something more modern, (and possibly this may care about getting the address family for us too in the socket() call). And to care about the "port" abstraction being the same, or being accessible by getservby..(). And to hope all the stream/dgram semantics are sufficiently close. Or maybe the NRL getaddrinfo() is about to solve this? :)
I imagine that someone has a single ftp program, which is compiled once with our c library, and it is able to do connections to tcp/ipv4 and tcp/ipv6 (that's already almost normal.. :), AND tcp/ipx, spx/ipx, maybe TP/OSI, and anything one can think of. It looks to me a goal which is worth to think about.
Janos
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