> can we at least agree that packets bound for these addresses should all
> go through the loopback back to the local machine?

Yes, I agree completely.

> can we also not agree that setting the route using $hostname is bad
> for a machine that has multiple addresses (pot luck routing)?

Yes!

> if we don't need the route added explicitly, why do we need it at all?

I believe it's a performance hack.   The lo0 interface has an MTU of
32768, instead of 1500, and probably does less work on each packet.

> are inet addresses no longer going to be assigned this way?  isn't
> netstart supposed to be able to read the ifconfig.### files anyway?
> doens't it "implicitly" know how to parse the file?

Netstart doesn't need to parse the ifconfig.xx files - they are
completely opaque to it.   All it does is make sure that ifconfig is
called once for each line in each ifconfig.xx file.

			       _MelloN_