Consider removing From<IpXXAddr> for IpXXNetwork

Question

Consider removing From<IpXXAddr> for IpXXNetwork

sunshowers opened this issue a month ago · comments

Hi there, thanks for maintaining this crate!

At our workplace we ran into an issue where we were accidentally converting an Ipv6Addr to an Ipv6Network. The conversion seems a bit risky because an address and a network represent different things.

In contrast, From<Ipv4Network> for IpNetwork and From<Ipv6Network> for IpNetwork are reasonable to have.

Would you consider removing these impls and maybe introducing single constructors to represent the single IP use case? That would have made this bug much easier to spot.

Thanks!

Abhishek Chanda · Answer 1 · Wed May 01 2024 03:53:32 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Hi 👋 sounds like you want a conversion from Ipv6Addr to Ipv6Network to error out, but that does not happen due to this impl https://github.com/achanda/ipnetwork/blob/master/src/ipv6.rs#L315 so you want to remove those impls. Is that correct? What would the type signature of the single constructor be?

Rain · Answer 2 · Wed May 01 2024 03:57:29 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Thanks for the quick response! Yes, I'm suggesting removing those impls. It'll be a breaking change, but I think one that's good from an API misuse perspective.

How about just an Ipv6Network::single(addr: Ipv6Addr) constructor? I'm not saying don't provide this, I'm just saying that it would be nice for that to be more explicit.