Re: [PATCH] socket: Add AF_NETLINK support.

[Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>]

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ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> One concern we discussed on IRC is precisely that it’s Linux-only, and
> so far we’ve tried to avoid promoting Linux-only interfaces.
>
> An argument in favor of having it in libguile proper is that it cannot
> be implemented outside since we need ‘make-socket-address’ to do the
> right thing.
>
> Another one is that it just provides bindings to the existing socket
> interface, and like other parts of the socket interface, libguile would
> just mirror what the OS provides.
>
> OTOH, it could be argued that libnl is more appropriate than the socket
> interface anyway, and that one can write FFI bindings to libnl.

I think Linux-only interfaces is a real concern, as it will lead to
guile programs that work only on Linux.

An alternative is to look at something like quagga, which has a glue
layer for various OS support for netlink/rtsock/?.   That's more work,
but would let people implment a non-OS-specific interface on multiple
systems and allow portable scheme code.

But, that's much harder.


Until then, why can't the netlink code not be part of guile, and just
another package to build and install and then access via use-modules,
sort of how guile-pg is separate?  Other than wanting to avoid an extra
package, what's the downside?

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