Re: [HACKERS] Summary: what to do about INET/CIDR

[Alex Pilosov]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Tom Lane wrote:

> The way I'm visualizing this, INET is a generalized type that will store
> any 4-octet address plus any netmask width from 1 to 32.  This includes
> not only host addresses, but network specs and broadcast addresses.
> CIDR is a subset type that only accepts valid network specs (ie, no
> nonzero address bits to the right of the netmask).  There is no subset

I really don't think it should. We should have as much error-checking as
possible. Broadcast address does _not_ have a netmask, i.e. 10.0.0.255/24
does not make sense as inet, it should be 10.0.0.255/32

(ie. broadcast() function must return a value with /32 mask)

> type that corresponds to "valid host addresses only" --- if there were,
> it would be a subset of INET but would have no valid values in common
> with CIDR.  We could make such a type but I dunno if it's worth the
> trouble.