[gumby]

"martian" isn't an official term from the RFCs, and is terrible usage. If linux is not running on mars at the moment (perhaps in the Chinese rover?) it surely will be in the not too distant future. And a router in orbit may need to distinguish between martian and terrestrial traffic.

Which the code can easily do of course, but a foolish name like this could confuse someone debugging code during development, or worse while debugging a communication problem in process far away.

(BTW this is an earnest, not humorous comment).

[kamray23]

Martian is an official term from the RFC's, though? It's mentioned in section 5.3.7 of RFC 1812 from 1995. That happens to be the exact section of the exact RFC with the recommendation whose kernel implementation is shown in the article. It seems to be fairly established terminology, having sat in that RFC for the last 28 years.

[gumby]

Thanks! It wasn't in the ones I looked at.

Darn, it's still a short-sighted choice. Even "interstellar" would be good for another 75 years or so ( https://i4is.org/what-we-do/technical/project-dragonfly/ ), though "intergalactic" would be better, even if ipv6 were used.

[kamray23]

Jump it in the middle with "intergalactic planetary, planetary intergalactic" packets and nobody can think it's actually from space.

[gumby]

“TilBrooklyn” would be less confusing.

[kadoban]

To me it does not seem like it would arise in similar enough contexts to be confusing.

"Martian" meaning the planet would come up in application code, not in the kernel. Why would the kernel even have that concept?

[gumby]

It’s an argument to sysctl, for example, which could confuse someone on earth trying to configure something far away.

> sudo sysctl net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians=1

[kadoban]

sysctl is kernel parameters though, right? I just can't imagine being confused by that, it's too divorced from anything that would care what planet it's on.