hg: jdk7/jsn/jdk: 6717876: Make java.net.NetworkInterface.getIndex() public

[Alan Bateman]

Mark Wielaard wrote:
> :
> Thanks. On irc I was pointed to "CCC" review board which currently is
> "under construction": http://openjdk.java.net/guide/reviewBodies.html
> and not planned to be made public till 2008/Q2. Would it be possible to
> publish a summary whenever such a CCC has occurred to the
> announce/discuss list till then? Just something simple like "The CCC
> received a request from X for public interface change Y with as
> justification Z. The CCC process ended in an Approval/Disapproval for
> the following reason...". Then at least these kind of changes don't just
> have a commit without any public discussion.
>   
This seems a reasonable suggestion to me. I don't know the priority of 
this compared to other infrastructure work but sending notifications to 
a public mailing list might be a good start.

> :
> Aha. OK. I might be dense, but I don't think I am the only person not
> immediately making the link between these methods and the RFC 2133
> "Interface Identification" and how they are used as described in RFC
> 2292 for selecting the outgoing interface. So a pointer to this in the
> documentation might be helpful. Also an small code example how to
> actually use these interface identifiers would help make the interface
> more clear. So I assume the Index returned can be used as an Scope
> identifier when creating a Inet6Address. In that case it would be good
> to mention that in the documentation also. And maybe even change the
> method name (if not too late) to getScopeIndex() or something a bit more
> descriptive.
>   
I agree that the new methods and the section in Inet6Address that 
defines scoped addresses should reference each other. This is something 
I suggested to Jessie a few months ago but it didn't make it into these 
changes.

I'm not sure about the suggested method name though. The zone index, or 
scope id as it is known in the Inet6Address spec, might be something 
that isn't an interface index. This means the integer that identifies 
the interface might not always correspond to the zone index (Michael, 
Jessie, correct me if I've got this wrong).

-Alan.