Which brings up a question; could we make a framework, which could allow
changing protocols under applications, without recompiling?
I.e. currently to change an application to support IPv6 we need to hack
around, and change socket(AF_INET,..) into a conditional
socket(AF_INET6,..) and changing the resolver calls to something more
modern, (and possibly this may care about getting the address family for
us too in the socket() call). And to care about the "port" abstraction
being the same, or being accessible by getservby..(). And to hope all the
stream/dgram semantics are sufficiently close. Or maybe the NRL
getaddrinfo() is about to solve this? :)
I imagine that someone has a single ftp program, which is compiled once
with our c library, and it is able to do connections to tcp/ipv4 and
tcp/ipv6 (that's already almost normal.. :), AND tcp/ipx, spx/ipx, maybe
TP/OSI, and anything one can think of. It looks to me a goal which is
worth to think about.
Janos