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

[Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com>]

On 2008-08-14 11:20, Tony Li wrote:
>  
> 
> 
> |> 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.

I completely agree, but I was accepting Iljitsch's stipulation that
we can't touch the apps. Actually it turns out that Java apps have
very little trouble using IPv6, because all the socket gubbins is
hidden in the Java run-time. So there's an existence proof that you're
correct, or alternatively that I am, according to whether you regard
the Java run-time as a better socket library or as a shim on top
of the old one.

    Brian


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