[lwip-users] RE:Re: [lwip] The future of lwIP

[Kieran Mansley]

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Paul Sheer wrote:

> > all of everyone changing lwIP to suit their own purposes.  For example,
> > I've made many changes to my own branch of lwIP to make it more
> > suitable for gigabit speed networking, but these changes would not
> > be suitable for the main tree as it would be detrimental for many
> > others.
>
> Myself I am interested in these Gigabit modifications, but
> now I can't easily see them because they are not included!

If that's the case then maybe there should be a fork to allow people to
diverge towards gigabit networking, but I wouldn't want to do that at the
expense of people using small low memory systems, which is what lwIP is
intended for.

> This is what #ifdef's are for. Most generic packages have many
> many build options, and I would like to see LwIP become just
> as flexible.

This is exactly what I'm afraid of.  #ifdefs are great for small changes,
the odd line or two of code that needs to be different, but when you start
using them to switch between radically different code structures it can
get very messy and hard to maintain.

lwIP is attractive for many people because if its simplicity and clean
code, and the fact that it's easy to build and debug.  Trying to lever
support for everyone's system into the one system would probably break
that.  I'd much rather see it remain a generic stack, and have people add
their own refinements.

I think this illustrates exactly what I was trying to get at - we
obviously have a difference of opinion about changes to lwIP.  In cases
such as this where developers disagree, what happens?

Kieran

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