Before I go off and do something drastic like fork the iputils packages (the packages that give us a handy little tool called 'ping') I'd like to ask for advice from the wider community.
The iputils source package builds the iputils-{ping,tracepath,arping}
binary packages. Iputils-ping is the default ping in Debian, and is
thus rather important to get right. Unfortunately, the upstream source
and build process is a mess. The upstream developer is one of the
kernel network stack maintainers, and he wants the iputils package to
always work with the latest and greatest kernel functionality. As a
result, he includes lots of kernel headers in his programs rather than
using standard headers from /usr/include.
At one point I fixed the tracepath code so it would build using standard
headers. (I never uploaded the fix.) I haven't fixed ping, etc. The
thing is, this was so intrusive to both the build system and the code
that it can only be described as a fork. I'm not completely opposed to
forking this code, since it's fairly mature and not wildly changing (in
fact, there hasn't been a new release in quite some time... like years)
and it would allow me to clean it up a bit. But I'd like to get a
second opinion...
noah
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
