Re: Cleaning up the INET/CIDR mess

"Larry Rosenman" <ler(at)lerctr(dot)org> writes:

> We had a **LONG** discussion on the I/O formats back in the 7.2 timeframe.
> the current
> behavior is the result of that.

Well I wasn't around for 7.2 but I was for a discussion around 7.3, maybe it's
the same one. Regardless, back then there was an implied assumption that any
change would affect both types. I couldn't convince people because 10.1/16 for
a network address range really is a reasonable abbreviation for 10.1.0.0.

It turns out network address ranges and hosts really don't have the same needs
at all. 10.1 expanding to 10.1.0.0 is really nonsensical for hosts and 10.1
expanding to 10.0.0.1 is nonsensical for network address ranges.

Now that they're going to be two different types proper I think it's not a bad
idea at all to revisit any design decisions that were made as a consequence of
them being mashed into one pseudo type.

Note that this would be entirely backwards compatible since inet doesn't
actually accept any abbreviated syntaxes at all currently. Only cidr does.

--
greg