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

[Kevin Oberman]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 9:56 PM, Jason Hellenthal <jhellenthal at dataix.net>wrote:

> It would be awesome if there was a -rfc1149 flag that would print a ascii
> pigeon to the terminal...
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 12:41 AM, Eitan Adler <lists at eitanadler.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 12:19 AM, Jim Thompson <jim at netgate.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >> On Feb 11, 2014, at 21:25, Jason Hellenthal <jhellenthal at dataix.net>
> > wrote:
> > >>
> > >> Haha careful 64 might be considered 64bit protocol support ;-)
> > >
> > > IPv6 addresses are 128 bits, (because: innumeracy).
> > >
> > >> and someone might confuse 46 as a DHCP option rfc2132
> > >
> > > The NetBIOS node type?
> > > The joke might be funnier as 0x46, which is the VISA protocol (an
> > instrumentation bus).
> >
> > I'm just waiting for RFC 1149 support.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Eitan Adler
> >
>

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.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com