On Sun, 23 May 1999, Alex Zepeda wrote:

> This would make any application using KSock IPv6 ready, transparently.

Whoops, this was not at all what I meant to say.  What I'm thinking about
is, how does one determine if the address should be an IPv4 or IPv6
address?

Some IPv6 stacks (most?) have created separate programs that are ipv6
enabled.  Apparently IPv4 addresses can be specified with ::FFFF:*

What MS has done, and all Unix stacks should have done also is to
implement gethostbyname2() which solves hostname -> ip# lookups.

This leaves the following problems:

* numerical IPv6 addresses

If one looks at an IPv6 address in its full glory it looks like:
3ffe:b00:c18:1fff:0:0:0:11, which is invalid in a url
It can be possibly shortened to something like:
3ffe050104020a000a0046fffe00e39c which *could* be an IPv4 hostname.

* limiting lookups to a certian family (i.e.: you want only an ipv4
connection to www.kame.net).

With non http protocols, one could specify perhaps ?transit=ipv6, or with
http one could use the http6:// protocol (except for the fact that KURL
barfs on numbers in the protocol name).

Thoughts?  Comments?

- alex