UDP Socket Options

[millarkav at yahoo.com]

You may want or you may not want the UDP checksum,
depending on what sort of error checking exists in the
overlying protocol. This needs to be determined on a
protocol by protocol, per socket, since some protocols
might want it and others might not. It must be the
application programmers choice and freedom to decide
whether they need this or not by turning it off and on
through a socket option.

Turning on and off the dont fragment bit determines
whether a packet will be broken up into fragments if
it is too large for a router along the path, or
whether a messsage too big error will be returned.
This would be useful for many things, such as a PMTU
implementation (Path MTU, largest allowed packet size
for a route to a destination). Agian, this needs to be
per socket, since some protocol might want it and
others not. Some might want to use their own PMTU
implementation, some may not want to use any PMTU.

These are options that should be available to the
programmer for their freedom. Yes, I really do need
these features, and others may. Just becuase one
person might not need them doesn't mean no one else
should not have access to them.

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