On 28 jan 2008, at 11:17, Rémi Després wrote:
<< Applications may use PF_INET6 sockets to open TCP connections to IPv4nodes, or send UDP packets to IPv4 nodes, by simply encoding the destination's IPv4 address as an IPv4-mapped IPv6 address, and passing that address, within a sockaddr_in6 structure, in the connect() or sendto() call. >>How important is this feature in practice? Could we deprecate it?IMO deprecating it would be a bad step backward!
Indeed.I can't say that I spend a lot of time writing applications, but I consider having a single interface to talk IPv4 and IPv6 extremely important. Without that, it's very easy to have bugs that only come up in one IP version and it is of course extra work to have two sets of socket calls. Worse, it's not possible to create IP version agnostic applications.