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

Mark Martinec Mark.Martinec+freebsd at ijs.si
Fri Feb 14 01:40:14 UTC 2014


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 ;)

   Mark


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