brainstorming for UDS-N - Package Selection and Defaults

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 09:55:15PM -0400, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre wrote:
> That said, that's one of the things I will be focusing on at UDS;
> along with a blueprint I have yet to write regarding upgrades to the
> networking stack in general.

On that note, I'd like us to look at what we need to do to support IPv6
properly.  IPv4 exhaustion has been "real soon now" for at least a
decade, but we really are getting alarmingly close.  The IPv4 Address
Report at http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html currently
predicts regional Internet registry exhaustion in January 2012.  As a
Wikipedia editor puts it
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion#Exhaustion_date):

  "The time remaining until the first RIR exhaustion is a short time for
  the entire industry to transition to IPv6.  This situation is
  aggravated by the likelihood that until exhaustion there will be no
  significant demand for IPv6."

I know that we're pretty close, and that it's perfectly possible to run
IPv6-capable systems on Ubuntu.  However, I'm not convinced that this is
really consumer-ready yet.  Every time anyone breathes on glibc's IPv6
support we seem to have a rash of people recommending blacklisting the
ipv6 module or other similar hacks to get around one problem or another,
and there are all kinds of other niggling bugs.  We need a plan to make
sure we aren't caught on the hop when ISPs start handing out IPv6
addresses by default.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]