What it is:

	Modules Net::Gen, Net::Inet, Net::TCP, Net::UDP, and Net::UNIX.
	Net::Gen is not a good name, I know that, but what's in it
	really belongs in Socket, I think.  In any case, I'm open to
	votes for a better name.  Well, I would be, but it's appeared in
	a Perl Resource Kit from O'Reilly & Associates, so maybe it's
	pretty well cast in stone after all now.  C'est la guerre.

What's different from other offerings:

	Layering keeps PF_INET things in Inet, and only socket-generic
	stuff is in Gen.

	Friendly {g,s}etsockopt.

	A TIESCALAR interface for really simple socket communications.

	Properly handles connects to hosts with multiple addresses as
	long as gethostbyname() returns more than one address.  (See RFC
	1123.)

What's still missing:

	Support for non-blocking sockets is under-tested at best.  The
	select, fhvec, ioctl, and fcntl methods aren't necessarily all
	one would wish.

	A proper set of regression & verification tests.

	Proper handling of timeout options.  Timed connect() and
	accept() seem to be working now, but there's no direct support
	for, say, sending as much of a block of data as possible in a
	given timeout period.

	Configuration testing to get the include files right on more
	systems, and to manage to find the constants which at least some
	Linux systems have as enums rather than as #defines.  (I think I
	have this one covered now, but that isn't proved yet.)  Other
	UNIX variants may need tweaking, and I've no idea whether it'll
	work on Win32 Perl.

	Better support (besides the plethora of protocol constants) for
	raw socket communications (required for the ICMP values to be
	useful).

	Probably several other things I won't have missed (yet).


The .pm files themselves are pod-ified (somewhat), with a catalogue of
the methods.

I'm not a technical writer, nor do I usually play one on the net.
The documentation could still use a lot of work, I'm sure.

Making it all work requires perl 5.004 or later.

A simple test script:

	#!/usr/bin/perl

	use Net::TCP;

	$f = new Net::TCP 0, 'finger';
	die "Can't establish finger socket: $!\n" unless $f;

	put $f "-s\015\012";
	$f->shutdown(1);
	print $line while defined($line = getline $f);
	undef $f;

	die "Can't tie to finger socket: $!\n" unless
		tie $f,'Net::TCP',0,'finger';

	$f = "-s\n";
	print $line while (defined $line=$f);
	untie $f;

Should be the same (on most BSD-ish systems, anyway) as
	finger ; finger
to the shell.


Anyway, bug reports & feature requests to me (spider@Orb.Nashua.NH.US).

In particular, however, if you have compilation difficulties, check
the Makefile.PL file again, especially near "my @hfiles".  The list
of required system include files is almost entirely tester-contributed.
If it doesn't build (yet) on your system/configuration/version, see if
you can figure out why, following those guidelines.  Future users will
thank you, too.

Finally, previous releases of this code had a significantly different
internal implementation, which was slower (but worked in earlier versions
of perl5 than this code ever could have).  If you were using the internals
of the implementation rather than sticking to the documented interfaces,
you will have some work to do before your derived classes will work again.

# Copyright 1995,1996,1997,1998 Spider Boardman.
# All rights reserved.
#
# Automatic licensing for this software is available.  This software
# can be copied and used under the terms of the GNU Public License,
# version 1 or (at your option) any later version, or under the
# terms of the Artistic license.  Both of these can be found with
# the Perl distribution, which this software is intended to augment.
#
# THIS PACKAGE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
# IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
# WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.