Developing IP version-independent Applications

[js.jason.lin@foxconn.com]

Hi,

I have some questions about  the article, "Application Aspects of IPv6 Transition".

In this draft, it mentions the importance about developing IP version-independent applications.
It also considers the applications supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 in an" IPv4-only node."
Under these considerations, the authors recommend using version-independent socket API in section 6.

However, in an IPv4-only node, it's most likely that RFC 3493, "Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6",
is not supported on the platform. Applications written as "version-independent" convention could have a problem.
For example, "getaddrinfo" or "getnameinfo" might not be supported on the node. I wonder if we still need
conditional compilation for applications to separate the code for "dual-stack" and "ipv4-only" node respectively.

Regards,
Jason Lin