Re: Initial SCTP support for the upcoming 1.6.5 release

[Marius Vollmer]

>> As long as SCTP needs an external library and is not supported
>> directly by libc, we think it is better to not include it in
>> guile-core.
>
> Hmm. This might be a bit special. The functions socket, send, recv
> and so on are simply extended to support SCTP. New functions will
> not become part of libc. All SCTP implementations (well, the
> Linux Kernel implementation, the BSD kernel implementation and
> the Solaris implementation) provide the sctp_* functions in a
> libsctp library. This is similar to Solaris, for example, where
> you need to link against a socket library to use socket functions.
> So they is also not part of libc. But, yes, networking is not core
> functionality, it is only needed by some, not by all, programs.

I think I have misunderstood the nature of SCTP.  Although one can
argue that networking is not needed by all programs, we nevertheless
do provide sockets in guile-core.  So, from the perspective of Guile,
networking clearly is core functionality, right now.

I thought SCTP was a kind of additional protocol for a specific
purpose, like maybe FTP or HTTP.  I don't think we should have support
for protocols like this in guile-core.  (I did understand that SCTP is
on the same layer as TCP and UDP...)

But as you say, SCTP seems different.  The socket function directly
understands the request for SOCK_SEQPACKET (which will use SCTP,
right?) and you can use the read/write syscalls to use such a socket.

Is that correct?