The biggest problem with the socket API is that it makes it impossible
to use in a shell script context or other context where it isn't
practical to operate on binary data. The second-biggest problem with
the API is that it at least historically makes it basically impossible
to write address-family-independent code... something like "telnet"
shouldn't need to know if it's operating over TCP on IPv4, TCP on
IPv6, SPX on IPX...; it should be able to resolve a string to a name and
then create a connection, and the address family stuff should be
encasulated in the library.
The first problem a namespace-like solution would deal with... then
one could open /dev/sock/stream/ipv4/206.189.222.9/23 using a normal
open() call. The second is to resolve "poetry.vogon.net","telnet" to
the above string, but that's a user-space issue.
At least it would be nice if open() on a Unix domain socket would
connect to that socket.
-hpa
-- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot." http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt <amsp@zytor.com> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/