Re: [PATCH] socket: Add AF_NETLINK support.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

David Thompson <address@hidden> skribis:

> This is my first attempt at providing support for AF_NETLINK sockets in
> Guile, based on a preliminary patch that Ludovic sent me.  Netlink
> sockets are supported only on Linux.  The ultimate goal of this work is
> to be able to create virtual ethernet devices from Scheme code.
>
> There are no tests yet and I'm not sure if I went overboard by defining
> all of the numerous netlink families and multicast group constants.
> Feedback requested! :)

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.

What do people think?

Ludo’.