RE: [RRG] On identifiers, was: Re: Does every host need a FQDN

["Tony Li" <tony.li@tony.li>]

|> Now NOT changing applications means that the identifiers 
|must look a lot
|> like regular IP addresses. 
|
|More precisely, it means we can't change the socket API, so I think
|a shim in the socket layer may be the way to go.


This seems a bit backwards.  Shouldn't the socket API in BSD have been the
correct abstraction that matched the semantics that we wanted our various
network namespaces to have?  Sure, it's 20/20 hindsight, but should
applications really have to worry about resolving a name and then explicitly
binding to an IP address?  Isn't that necessarily broken in the case of a
multi-home host?  Shouldn't that be abstracted away from the application?

In one sense, accepting the socket API as immutable is to ossify the entire
architecture perennially when we can all clearly see that mistakes were made
(albeit with the best of intentions and all available foresight at the
time).  Shouldn't we, as a research group, be looking past that to what a
new socket API might also look like?

Before the flames start, please consider the ability of a host to support
both a new and old version API simultaneously, with the older API being
deprecated.

Tony


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