Subject: two pings? (was Re: CVS commit: basesrc)
To: None <itojun@iijlab.net>
From: Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com>
List: tech-net
Date: 07/01/1999 19:37:58
itojun@iijlab.net writes:
> >Should this really be a separate program? Shouldn't it just be the
> >case that if you ping a v6 address you get v6 ping, and that if there
> >is an ambiguity you resolve it with a command line flag? Two programs
> >doing just about the same thing seem unnecessary...
> 
> 	It depends...
> 	Amount of code that can be shared is small (due to differences between
> 	icmp and icmp6),

Well, "it depends". If you modularize stuff properly, you end up
sharing a lot of code that does stuff like processing all the flags,
figuring out the mean and stddev, etc. In general, I don't want to be
thinking about what IP the remote host is running -- I just want to
ping (unless I say otherwise).

> 	Also, as KAME tries to avoid adding unstability into IPv4 part of
> 	base system, we decided to make them separate.

Well, I agree that we want stability, but we have time before the next 
release to fix it all up.

> 	Just keep it here (it makes no harm) and wait for someone dare to merge.

Okay, fair enough -- but I think that the principle has to be one
program for v4 and v6 in the long run.

Perry