"Programmers can't get IPv6 thus that is why they do not have IPv6 in their applications"....

Tue Nov 27 23:29:11 UTC 2012

In message <CAP-guGUZU-Or-gtRP3VdaHPk-BTAM1gZYT8yTJF0PPcb8keVng at mail.gmail.com>
, William Herrin writes:
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Jeroen Massar <jeroen at unfix.org> wrote:
> > I cannot be saf for the people who claim to be programmers who do things
> > with networking and who do not care to follow the heavy hints that they
> > have been getting for at least the last 10 years that their applications
> > need to start supporting IPv6.
> 
> Your lack of sorrow is immaterial to the programmers in question. And
> in the vast majority of cases the network is incidental to their
> software's role. The network is the tool not the product. They'll use
> the available tool.
> 
> 
> > As for actually getting IPv6 at home or at work, there are so many ways
> > to get that, thus not having it is a completely ridiculous excuse.
> 
> At home sure. If they're willing to go to a little bit of effort they
> can have a tunnel.
> 
> At work, few programmers have any control whatsoever over the
> available network resources in their development environment. Heck,
> most count it a win if they can get corporate IT to disable realtime
> virus checking in the compile tree so that they can compile an
> application in a reasonable length of time. Control fine details of
> the network environment? You must kidding.
> 
> 
> > (It might not be native, so wh00p, you can test fine also on a local
> > link in the extreme case)
> 
> You know better. You can't test worth sh*t without a real network
> connection with hosts on the other side that do things you weren't
> expecting.
> 
> 
> > As such, if an application does not do proper IPv6 today the people in
> > charge of the thing simply did not care...
> 
> did not care = true
> simply = false
> 
> Deciding which of the nice-to-haves you're just not going to care
> about is rarely a simple question.
> 
> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
> 
> 
> -- 
> William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
> 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
> 

And for 99% of apps using getaddrinfo() instead of gethostbyname()
is all that is required to make them work with IPv6 and the
documentation for getaddrinfo() has example code.  getaddrinfo()
works on a IPv4 only network.  You read the API specfication, you
write to it and it works 99.9% of the time and when it doesn't you
file a bug report with the API vendor.

I've reported bugs to all the major OS vendors over the years.  IPv4
and IPv6 bugs.  I've just reported bugs to Apple and FreeBSD over
the iteraction, or lack of it, between IPV6_USE_MIN_MTU and TCP
segment sizes.  Havn't tested Linux's equivalent setsockopt yet.

The fix to the BSD kernel to adjust the segment size is about 4
lines of additional code.  One of the advantages of oss, you can
go in there and fix it if you need to.

I've coded for platforms that I have never worked on.  It's a little
more difficult but not impossible.  I've debugged problems on
machines that I don't have access to.  Again it is more difficult
but not impossible.

Mark
-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka at isc.org