>> There are excellent reasons why IPv6 is preferred to IPv4 by >> default, and this is not going to change. > > I'm very interested in this! What are the reasons?
The basic idea is that we want to make sure that either there's no IPv6 at all, or IPv6 works fine. This is important, since it's easy to write software that detects and works around the lack of IPv6, but it's next to impossible to write software that will reliably detect broken IPv6. By preferring IPv6 to IPv4, we make sure that broken IPv6 is something that people notice, and hence we have a good chance that there won't be to many broken IPv6 deployments. If IPv4 were preferred to IPv6, then people could add RAs to their network even though their IPv6 routing is broken -- most clients wouldn't notice, they'd just continue using IPv4. Now your particular deployment of IPv6 doesn't fit the ``IPv6 at least as good as IPv4'' model that we are promoting; hence, you need to hack your gai.conf files. Which is fine -- what you do on your private network is your private business. What is not okay is suggesting that Debian change the default, and break a deployment model that the networking community has agreed on -- if you don't agree with a stan- dard, you work on getting it revised, you don't just change your distribution unilaterally. By the way, this is a somewhat unsatisfactory solution: manually hacking /etc/gai.conf doesn't scale. The networking community is aware of that, and are working on a solution -- see RFC 5220 and 5221. Juliusz -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org