* Noah Meyerhans ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > On Fri, Oct 21, 2005 at 10:13:30PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: > > > Is a portable version required to be not working and not up to date? > > If the upstream maintainer is not interested in it, yes. > > It depends on what you mean by "up to date". If we're only including > glibc headers, then we can only use functionality that glibc supports. > If we bypass glibc and directly use kernel functionality, then we get > all the latest and greatest kernel networking features. However, the > programs are then entirely linux specific, and may even fail to work > correctly on different (typically older) version of Linux. > > So yes, in some sense, a portable ping may be out of date. This is > exactly why the upstream author didn't accept my patches to remove the > dependency on kernel headers. He cares more about the package being up > to date. Our requirements may be slightly different, though.
It seems like the 'sensible' thing to do might be to provide both.
Typically I would think the standard 'ping' would be, well, pretty
standard, and would work across multiple kernels/OSes/etc. We could
also have an 'lping' or some such which supported all the
latest-greatest linux-based stuff.
I don't think they'd necessairly need to be different packages (though
if different implementations already exist in different packages, that's
fine). Just my 2c.
Stephen
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