RE: HEADSUP: arp-v2 has been committed

Hi Hartmut,

I appreciate your candid feedback. You raised many valid points. 
I combined both of your emails in this reply, please see my 
comments below ...

<snip>

> 
> Also one thing that would be extremly helpful is a short description
of
> that interface arp(4). Currently one has to reverse engineer arp.c to
> understand how to do things.
>

This project has been in the making for quite a long time.
I had a lot of content prepared to write in the commit message in my
head, but when the moment final arrived in the end, my mind went blank
perhaps due to that much anticipation. Funny how that works. 
I will provide more text on this subject after things have settled
down.

> 
>  - this is code maintained in another repository and imported to
> FreeBSD. Luckily the cvs-times are over where this commit would have
> taken the files of the vendor branch. But nevertheless it is never a
> good idea to change code in contrib without pushing the changes
> upstream.
> 

This was due to my lack of understanding about the structure of
that section of the repository. Thank you for providing this 
information.

>
> - you just removed a lot of code and left the ipNetToMedia table
> entirely disfunctional.
> 
> - you obviously did not test the change. Otherwise you would have seen
> that it did not work.
>

No, I did not test that piece of code. There were so much to do in 
the end, and having modified arp and ndp myself, I estimated the fix
would not be difficult even if I broke it. So I took a calculated
gamble.

Thank you for fixing my bugs.

>
> And another point: when changing external interfaces it might be
> possible to ask for a full port build with the changes to look for the
> fall-out on ports. I would say that this commit was a good candidate
to
> get the port maintainers into the boat earlier.
>
> not so happy,
>

You are absolutely right. This was a complete oversight on my part.
I was telling myself "I think I am forgetting something". 
... then I remembered when the first port breakage report arrived ;-)

To be fair though, I did send a message titled 
"last call for L2/L3 rewrite code review" a week before the commit
to net_at_, current_at_ and all of the developers.
And I have sent many emails on this subject in the past few years.

A couple of points I hope you could recognize:

1. The arp-v2 project replaces a major networking kernel design and 
   all of its dependencies that have been in operation for many years 
   (16+ ??). The networking kernel went through quite a surgery so 
   do expect things will continue to evolve.

2. This is the first time I am making such a major change in the
   kernel. Since I am still learning the process, I am bound to
   make mistakes but I will not repeat these mistakes in the future.

   My goal is to be diligent in monitoring the problem reports and
   provide timely responses and fixes.

And finally I want to thank you and others for your hard work in
helping me cleaning up the ports.

Thanks again.

Cheers,

--Qing