rsync ipv6 patch merge?

[Martin Pool <mbp@samba.org>]

On 13 Aug 2001, "William F. Maton" <wmaton@ryouko.dgim.crc.ca> wrote:
> On 13 Aug 2001, Heikki Vatiainen wrote:
> 
> > The rsync daemon we use is plain 2.4.6 patched with KAME rsync patch
> > rsync-246-v6-20000907.diff.gz [1]. It looks like there is a good
> > possibility to get IPv6 merged in, since just today a rsync developer
> > was asking if anyone wants it [2]. If no one objects, I can reply and
> > say that Debian IPv6 project has interest in this.
> 
> Please do.

OK.  (Free software is so good sometimes.  :-) 

So, perhaps I can draw on the expertise of people on this list and ask
a few questions:

After looking through the KAME rsync patch it seems reasonable.  

One concern is that its configure.in tests whether the *build* machine
has IPv6 in the kernel, and uses that as apparently a gating condition
on including IPv6 support.  I can imagine distribution-builders who
may not have IPv6 in the build machine kernel, but still want to
enable it in binary packages.  We could easily fix this.

rsync supports a fair number of unix-like platforms at the moment,
some of which are rather old or idiosyncratic.  So, while the new
IPv6/v4 sockets API looks quite nice, I think we cannot count on it
being present.  Any advice here would be welcome.  The KAME patch
seems to *replace* the old interface by the new one, which is OK for a
patch but would probably not be adequate if we want a single tree that
will build on old platforms.

Is the library support sufficiently stable that Debian would ship with
IPv6 support in rsync if it was enabled?  Are you confident in
supporting it?  When I've enabled ipv6 interfaces on a Woody box I
found a disturbing number of things broke, most importantly ssh.  I'm
sure that will improve.

--
Martin