The following reply was made to PR lib/16518; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Matthias Drochner <M.Drochner@fz-juelich.de>
To: YAMAMOTO Takashi <yamt@mwd.biglobe.ne.jp>
Cc: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org, lib-bug-people@NetBSD.org,
	netbsd-bugs@NetBSD.org, gnats-admin@NetBSD.org
Subject: Re: lib/16518 (some fixes to libpcap) 
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:17:39 +0100

 yamt@mwd.biglobe.ne.jp said:
 > if it's considered a kernel bug, we can fix kernel implementations
 
 I don't think this is realistic. The kernel code used unsigned
 all the time, and it was imported into x operating systems.
 (I'd say signed would feel a bit more "natural", but then
 we would need at least need "signed loads" of bytes/shorts,
 or perhaps explicite "sign extend" operations to make it useful.)
 
 > if it was "(-10)/2 == -5", one might think it's natural to
 > optimize it to TRUE
 
 Hmm, this would open the way to much more confusion:
 "(-10)/2 > -6" would have to be FALSE because comparisions
 are explicitely unsigned and documented to be so at all places.
 (Well, 2 places I know of: the pcap manpage and the section
 about expressions in tcpdump's.)
 Imho the only way to be consistent is to state that all
 operations are unsigned and that "-X" is just a shortcut
 for "~X + 1".
 
 > > bring a discussion on tcpdump-workers
 > i'm happy if you just beat me
 
 I might do so... I'm currently planning for next week and
 it might well happen that I'm AFK all the time.
 It might take some time.
 
 best regards
 Matthias