Re: 16 year old bug

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 10:15:58PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:46:16 -0400 (EDT) der Mouse
> <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> wrote:
> > The reason was exactly this: growing the space without renumbering
> > when the original space's pair had alreayd been allocated
> > elsewhere.  Was it necessary?  Not for most values of "necessary".
> > Was it useful? Definitely.
> 
> Was it, for practical purposes, unsupportable? Was it something
> likely to cause subtle bugs all over the networking stack? Was it
> something obsoleted more or less 20 years ago? All yes.

That's silly.  A bitmask is a bitmask, and there's nothing magical or
difficult about masked compare.  Even the bug OpenBSD just fixed -- now
that it basically doesn't matter any more -- is hardly complex nor is
the fix so.

If it were so onerous to write correct code to do masked compares on
bitstrings I shudder to think what else in our kernel would be broken
forever.  But it's not.

I could care less whether support for noncontiguous subnet masks were
to disappear, but I would strongly prefer that nothing _else_ in the
system that relies on the IP stack supporting them be needlessly
broken in the process just so we can say we're modern and stylish.
That's just irresponsible.

Thor