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Re: what to do with iputils (ping, etc)



* Noah Meyerhans (noahm@debian.org) wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2005 at 10:13:30PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> > > Is a portable version required to be not working and not up to date?
> > If the upstream maintainer is not interested in it, yes.
> 
> It depends on what you mean by "up to date".  If we're only including
> glibc headers, then we can only use functionality that glibc supports.
> If we bypass glibc and directly use kernel functionality, then we get
> all the latest and greatest kernel networking features.  However, the
> programs are then entirely linux specific, and may even fail to work
> correctly on different (typically older) version of Linux.
> 
> So yes, in some sense, a portable ping may be out of date.  This is
> exactly why the upstream author didn't accept my patches to remove the
> dependency on kernel headers.  He cares more about the package being up
> to date.  Our requirements may be slightly different, though.

It seems like the 'sensible' thing to do might be to provide both.
Typically I would think the standard 'ping' would be, well, pretty
standard, and would work across multiple kernels/OSes/etc.  We could
also have an 'lping' or some such which supported all the
latest-greatest linux-based stuff.

I don't think they'd necessairly need to be different packages (though
if different implementations already exist in different packages, that's
fine).  Just my 2c.

	Stephen

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