OSPF and IPv6

David Rohleder davro at ics.muni.cz
Tue Feb 27 11:01:11 CET 2001


Martin Mares <mj at ucw.cz> writes:

> Hello!
> 
> > Yes, and have 2 binaries for those protocols. Very funny. :-(
> > 
> > I don't see any reason to make 2 binaries, when architecture of your
> > programm can easily support both protocols. 
> 
> The decision whether to support both protocols in a single binary or not
> was very hard, but I don't regret what we had chosen. Else we would get
> a ton of extra complexity in all the interfaces and data structures, all
> addresses would have to be tagged with address types, route entries would
> have to be either sized dynamically or according to the largest address
> type used, leading to much slower and space consuming result. In fact,
> I think this was one of the principial design failures of Zebra.
> 
> Also, IPv4 and IPv6 are two worlds which have only a little in common,
> namely the network interfaces they live on, hence it makes very little
> sense to combine them to a single program.

Ok then. But when doing ./configure you say --enable-ipv6 . No even a
simple word about effectively disabling ipv4 :-(


>  
> > Otherwise, there should be 2 binaries with different names - because
> > they do 2 different things.
> > 
> > bird-ipv4 and bird-ipv6
> > 
> > Think about adding BIRD to for example Debian distribution. If there
> > is only one name of this daemon, you have to create 2 conflicting
> > packages bird-ipv4 and bird-ipv6.
> 
> I see no problem in distributing bird as packages "bird" (with
> /usr/sbin/bird), "bird-ipv6" (providing /usr/sbin/bird-ipv6) and
> "bird-doc" providing the documentation. No conflicts there.
> 

Could you please make this change in your package? I mean, when
generating bird-ipv6 call it bird-ipv6 and make it read config file
etc/bird-ipv6.conf and use different socket for communication with
bird client.


I have also got a comment about export and import keywords. I don't
think it is a good idea to call it this way. These keywords are a part
of protocol statement, so "export" semantic is to export routes
originating in this protocol to routing table - you call it
"import". It is really confusing me.

-- 
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David Rohleder						davro at ics.muni.cz
Institute of Computer Science, Masaryk University
Brno, Czech Republic
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