Re: if_flags

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>> It would be nice to keep the API the same among *BSD.
>> The API for interface flags is rather ill-defined, is my impression.
> The API is defined in the 4.4BSD sources :-)  I'm semi-serious; there
> has to my knowledge been fairly little divergence.

The 4.4BSD sources are not an API spec any more than the NetBSD sources
are.

To cite the example at readiest hand in this thread: are the API fields
bearing interface flags (eg, struct ifreq .ifr_flags) defined to be
unsigned shorts, or are they defined to be some unsigned integral type
no larger than unsigned long int, or what?  If the former, converting
them to uint32_t is an API change; if the latter, it is not (note,
discussing API, not ABI, here).  And this is not a question that can be
answered by inspecting sources - unless there's a comment lurking
somewhere that talks about it, and while there may be such comments for
a few such fields, I've read enough of the code to be fairly sure most
of them have none.

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