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

[Tom Pusateri]

On Jan 11, 2014, at 8:04 AM, Thomas Steen Rasmussen <thomas at gibfest.dk> wrote:

> On 11-01-2014 13:05, Lev Serebryakov wrote:
>> Hello, Net.
>> 
>>   Is here any project to merge ping/ping6 into ping and
>> traceroute/traceroute6 into treaceroute? As IPv6 becomes more common these
>> days, it is very inconvenient to have these utilities separated.
>> 
> Hello,
> 
> I hope not, these should remain seperate, allow me to explain:
> 
> There is a good reason these utilities are seperated into v4 and
> v6 specific versions, while other tools support both. The reason
> is that ping and traceroute are network troubleshooting utilities
> that are only used for verifying/testing network connectivity.
> 
> When testing network connectivity you are usually thinking about a
> specific protocol. Having seperate versions of the tools removes the
> ambiguity for hostnames with both A and AAAA records. If you want
> to test v4, use ping, if you want to test v6, use ping6.
> 
> Normal network enabled utilities like telnet or ftp or nc support
> both because when using those you usually don't care about the
> address family used, you just want to connect. This is a significant
> difference from using ping or traceroute where you almost always
> want a specific address family, depending on what you are testing.
> 
> 
> Make sense ?
> 
> 
> Best regards
> 
> Thomas Steen Rasmussen

I believe it does make sense to merge ping6 functionality into ping. You don't have to stop shipping a ping6 command for those who are used to it. But there's little difference between ping6 and 'ping -6' in my opinion. The trickier part is at what point do you transition the default from 'ping -4' to 'ping -6'. But that doesn't have to happen right away.

Tom