Robert Marlow wrote:
My knee-jerk opinion is that the current use of HostName and PortID already assume IPv4 protocols such as TCP and UDP more than they could.
They have TCP baked in, but not IPv4. I posted a patch yesterday that generalises the functions in Network to work with IPv6 as well as v4, and it required no API changes.
Consequently, I think making the Network module more flexible for extension would involve getting rid of the current addressing scheme and implementing some new Address type which includes not just the address, but the protocol used.
I don't think there's much point in this. The Network module is not
especially well put together, but it's at least stable. It would be
more profitable to work on the network-alt package or something else
instead of trying to remould the existing API, while breaking it in the
process.