Re: thinking about siocgifconf and friends

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 07:00:42PM -0800, Jeff Bailey wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 13, 2001 at 03:56:08AM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> 
> > The plethora of network interfaces is really a pain. I will concentrate on
> > the most common interfaces for now. I don't have a good overview over all
> > interfaces used by different interfaces anyway. We will not have complete
> > replacements for the systems ifconfigs for some time, esp. for proprietary
> > systems. I will look into the existing linux code, but to be honest, some of
> > the linux interfaces are quite messy (for example SIOCGIFHWADDR).
> 
> Do you think that there's value in in taking notes and starting an 
> 'inetutils-devel.texi' file so that the learning that your getting can be 
> easily passed on?

It's valuable, but I don't have time for it (especially as I am feverishly
throwing out small to medium sized patches for the Hurd source). Also, to
write good documentation, you need to know more than you write down (IMO),
and this would result in very few things I could write down on this topic :)

But I have a different idea, which is not so time consuming, and everybody
can contribute. We should collect relevant online resources. A quick search
revealed for example the following:       RFC1180 A TCP/IP Tutorial

I have not read it yet, but it looks promising. I am sure everyone has their
own tips which documents helped him learning the inners of inet coding.

I can probably keep a few notes about basic compatibility issues (SA_LEN,
for example), but I can't make a promise even for that. But I will try to
make the code as expressive as I can :)

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org address@hidden
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    address@hidden
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