In article <200005132053.NAA21977@champagne.dsg.stanford.edu>,
Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU> wrote:

Jonathan, I don't think that Itojun has ever stated that he does
not want to fix these kinds of problems - in fact he has been very
quick responding to each problem.

> What I see suggests that some IPv6 mods are being committed without
> being tested *at all* on kernels without IPv6 beforehand.

That might be true, and we definitely appreciate you running current
and feeding back the bugs to us so we can fix them before 1.5.

> while that may make for a great, or even a perfect job, of producing
> an all-Ipv6 system, it is a *bad* job for people who need NetBSD 1.5
> to run as an IPv4-only system.

I agree, but looking at the frequency of bug reports we've been getting
there are *very* few people who strip ipv6 from their kernels.

> Till now, I had assumed that "IPv6 integration" included making sure
> that *non*-ipv6 systems also continued to work.  Itojun seems (to me)
> to be saying that *he* thinks its not his job to do that.  But it is
> very, very hard to tell.

I disagree with that as I mentioned before.
 
> I think it would be better all round if, instead of avoiding the
> issue, the IPv6 developers would say upfront how much testing of those
> changes is being done or planned on *non-IPv6 systems*
>   a) before committing
>   b) before the 1.5 branch is cut
>   c) during the 1.5 release process,
> 
> (and by whom), instead of avoiding the issue.

Jonathan, since you have personal interest in getting a non ipv6 system
working, I suggest that you keep sending bug reports [preferrably as PR's
instead of flames :-)] and we will fix them before 1.5 is released.

It is definitely a good goal to be able to run all applications on a
non ipv6 system.

Finally, yes the code is very new it has been tested only on specific
configurations. It has not been stressed a lot and behaves non-intuitively
in some cases. For example:

	mv /etc/services{,.foo}
	telnet machine.name

and watch the error message.

Let's calm down now and consider for a minute that Itojun is setting his
own plan and goals on ipv6 integration. These are very well aligned so
far with the NetBSD goals for the same. I am pretty sure that testing on
ipv4 only systems has not been given enough attention. But now that we
know how things break, we are going to be more careful when making changes
so that there will be less breakage. Still though nobody is promising to
do all the testing, but probably the importance of that will decrease as
the system stabilizes more.

christos