Certainly we have things like exim, lftp, ssh that work 'out of the box' with v6...and apps that work with v6 work (equally) flawlessly in v4-only environments.
Therefore, my vote for a goal (assuming it counts for anything, which point is moot) is that woody itself should include all of those v6-out-of-the-box tools, _configured_and_built_that_way_, since the v4 users will have no trouble with them (at least no more than bugs independent of either protocol).
Where we have third-party patches and whatnot (eg KAME), I'm a lot less vociferous. This is upstream territory. I wouldn't push a debian maintainer to put third-party v6 patches into v4 software. If they WANT to do that, well that's dandy, but that confers some responsibility, and not everyone will want to do that.
So, in my mind:1) Upstream apps that support can both v4 and v6 should be configured and built as packages to do that as a matter of policy. Good for v6, and no loss for v4. 2) Upstream apps that require additional patching for this functionality are at the discretion of the maintainer. They can patch it, or bug upstream to do it, or just sit on their thumbs.
D Brian May wrote:
Hello, I have posted this to both -ipv6 and -devel mailing lists, as I think it is an important issue to Debian as a whole. Is IPv6 a release goal for any future release of Debian ? The reason I ask is because in bug #80503, one of the responses was that IPv6 is not a release goal. However, I consider this attitude wrong, and think that the sooner that all packages support IPv6, the better. This will allow current IPv6 people more time to fix important IPv6 problems instead of debating whether or not a change is important enough to be included in unstable. Comments?