On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 00:15 -0700, David Miller wrote:

From: Jens Rosenboom <redacted>
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:22:05 +0200

quoted

On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 16:31 -0700, David Miller wrote:

quoted

From: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:13:42 -0700

quoted

On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 17:02 -0400, Chuck Lever wrote:

quoted

[ I would think user space in general should be using inet_pton(3)  
everywhere for such interfaces, so the format of these addresses  
wouldn't matter so much.  Probably impossible at this point. ]

David Miller is authoritative here.

In the final analysis, the risk is just too high to break
userspace.  So let's play conservative here and not change
the output for currently user visible stuff.

So just to clarify, do you want us to drop the whole thread and stay
with the clumsy output, or would you be o.k. with adding a new 
%p{something} and use that for kernel messages and maybe do some slow
migration of other stuff where possible?

You tell me what part of this you don't understand:

	So let's play conservative here and not change
	the output for currently user visible stuff.

I can't figure out a way to express that more clearly than I did.

I wasn't sure whether "currently user visible stuff" would mean "user
space interfaces" like sys/proc-fs, which the first quoted post asked
about, or also kernel messages.