The other day on IRC, the bot for one of the channels I frequent reconnected, and I noticed it was coming in over IPv4. I knew the host it was on is IPv6 capable, so I jokingly asked it "y u no ipv6?". The bot's owner told me "patches welcome" and pointed me at the bot's source. Now, some of you recall I cringe a bit when someone says that to me, but I decided to poke around.
As it turns out, the bot in question, called Jenni, is written in Python. I have a modicum of experience in Python, so I decided to dig in. Sure enough, there in the connect function was the dreaded AF_INET socket creation. At the bottom of the socket documentation are examples on how to write a connection function that can do both IPv4 and IPv6. getaddrinfo() is your friend.
Having never submitted any code on GitHub (which still doesn't have IPv6), I had to fumble my way through the procedures. Nevertheless, 45 minutes after "patches welcome", I had a pull request submitted to the author. I like to tell people "I don't patch code. I patch developers," but sometimes you just have to show 'em how it's done. My code was merged the next day.
As I write this, it occurs to me that some of you might not get the reference in the title of this post. See Wikipedia for clarification.
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