Merge ping+ping6 and traceroue+traceroute6 to single utilities?

[Jason Hellenthal]

> On Feb 13, 2014, at 20:40, Mark Martinec <Mark.Martinec+freebsd at ijs.si> wrote:
> 
> 2014-02-11, Mark Martinec wrote:
>> Remember the original PHK's story ( http://bikeshed.com/ ) ?
>> It ended favourably for the sleep(1) command, it got its new feature.
>> What can be learned there is: just needs someone to do it and be
>> persistent enough to be accepted.
>> Looks like a perfect task for Google Summer of Code 2014,
>> time to apply is very near:
>>  http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2014
> 
> 
> 2014-02-12, Kevin Oberman wrote:
>> For those who are new at IPv6, the ping6 and traceroute6 commands come from
>> the WIDE KAME project. KAME developed one of the earliest IPv6 stacks and
>> WIDE used FreeBSD.  It became the FreeBSD IPv6 stack and the ping6 and
>> traceroute6 utilities were brought in with the rest of the KAME code.
>> When these tools were written, the IPv6 stack and the supporting libraries
>> and APIs were very primitive. I suspect that it was quicker to write new
>> tools than to try to integrate IPv6 into the existing standard tools and,
>> when things were so rough, there was a clear effort to avoid changes to
>> working IPv4 code. Separate IPv4 and IPv6 tools made sense then, but the
>> need has long vanished... probably even before the KAME project ended. But
>> the old, separate tools lived on through simple inertia.
>> And so it is today. Inertia is NO reason that it should be this way forever.
> 
> 
> I have submitted two entries for FreeBSD Google Summer of Code 2014:
> 
>  https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2014
> 
> (should show up there eventually after a review, I hope),
> 
> one for a unified ping and ping6, the other for a unified traceroute
> and traceroute6. My first impression was that it may be possible to do
> both in a single 12 week GSoC job, although after checking existing
> source code and writing the proposal it now looks to me more like
> two full-time summer jobs, if they are to be done properly and with
> attention to details.
> 
> Looking for one, or preferably two, mentors for students for these tasks.
> I wonder if Bjoern A. Zeeb wouldn't be the best man for the job ;)
> 

Awesome, personally that would seem like the best route not only to have the focus on the tool itself but to put focus on achieving one or another either way it's progress.

If we were voting I couldn't agree more with Bjoern if he would accept it.. Couldn't imagine someone more in depth to fit the task.
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