[BUG?] uclient-fetch always requires -4 when IPv6 is disabled

For Developers
1

Hi, guys! Yeah, I reported this early this year, but couldn't track down the exact cause. Turns out, when you completely disable IPv6, uclient-fetch fails to connect (my guess is it tries to use IPv6 and doesn't fall back to IPv4), and always requires the -4 argument to work. Is this the desired behaviour, or could it be considered a bug? This is on the 19.07 branch, by the way. IIRC, at the time, 18.06 was working without -4.

2

Nope. Building without IPv6 is non-standard on any modern OS and many third-party applications fail in various ways

3

I find that answer rather confusing since:

  1. the OpenWrt build system specifically has an option do globally disable IPv6;
  2. uclient-fetch is an OpenWrt-specific utility (lightweight wget, basically), not third-party:

So where exactly is the bug? Is it in the build system, or in uclient-fetch?

4

You can also choose to build Linux without networking. That doesn’t mean it is standard. Bug is arguably in the choice to disable IPv6 and expect all IP-related programs and services to operate as if nothing had changed.

5

Well, in this case, it's arguably a regression, not a bug, since everything just worked in 18.06, but… you're right, we're at the end of 2019 and IPv6 is old enough to have sex. I'll just file it under "don't do that", then. :wink:

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6

I won’t dispute “regression” and it’s valuable information for those that choose to disable IPv6

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