OK, let me make sure I'm clear on this:

Is it the case that any network user must be able to guarantee that
Socket initializeNetwork has been called?

If so, this is clearly policy which needs documenting.  As a proponent
of XP I'm all for source code as documentation, but policy is not well
documented in source code unfortunately.  One more for the holy war for
class comments?

Ken

P.S. I've got to wonder if this couldn't be handled at some relatively
low level in a handful of places and remove this bit of policy.  Surely
there are a small handful of code pieces that must be passed through
before any use of network can be made, such as Socket creation.

On Tue, 2002-04-23 at 11:36, Andreas Raab wrote:
> Ken,
> 
> > > Socket initializeNetwork
> >
> > Is it a requirement that this be run before
> > any network access be made? 
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > If so, shouldn't it be run on image start every time?
> 
> No. It's just annoying if the system will try to dial up on your machine
> when you have no need to access the network.
> 
> > Or maybe run at some point in network socket setup?
> 
> Well ... maybe. And maybe not. It could be done but at the cost of
> having to do it from all over the places. Every time you create a socket
> the system would try to initialize the network, every time you do a name
> server lookup etc. etc. etc. Given that any given application needs to
> this call in only a very few places it seems overkill to do it over and
> over again.
> 
> Cheers,
>   - Andreas
> 
>