[Toybox] Question about ping.

[Isaac Dunham]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 07:51:13PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> I've been working on ping (for far too long) and I finally tracked down
> the "ping without root access" patch I remembered seeing a few years ago.
> 
> It's https://lwn.net/Articles/420799/ and example code (well, diff
> switching to use this) is at
> http://openwall.info/wiki/_media/segoon/iputils-ss020927-pingsock.diff
> 
> It went into the kernel shortly before the 3.0 release (commit
> c319b4d76b9e), meaning it's not there in 2.6.39 but it's there since
> 3.0, and given 3.16 shipped already and they're doing quarterly releases
> that's almost 4 years of kernels that support it. I think that includes
> at least one android release already.
> 
> My question is: should I _also_ include the old raw socket support (as a
> fallback? With a config option?) or is it good enough to just have this
> and not support ping on 2.6 kernels? (It's easy enough to make it
> compile even when it does work, or to have a compile-time probe to
> switch it off in defconfig...)
> 
> It does mean this command wouldn't be available from my oldest test
> build environment (ubuntu 8.04) but that LTS is no longer supported and
> can't necessarily even be installed anymore (the apt went away) so
> possibly I'm being a bit TOO conservative about supporting old build
> environments?

1) Ubuntu moves old releases to their archives at

http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/

2) 2.6.32 is still semi-widely used. 
(Ubuntu 10.04, RHEL/OEL/SL/CentOS/PHL* 6, Squeeze...)

*PHL: Pointy-Haired Linux

3) I doubt many peeople will make new projects with 2.6.3x kernels.
On the other hand, I do like being able to use toybox on my Gingerbread
phone (2.6.35).

> I'm interested in hearing people's opinions on this one. I can make the
> new codepath work and then add the old one later, so there's no rush on
> deciding...

I'd suggest doing the new one, then adding optional support for the old one
if requested.

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham

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