Thank you

[andryyy]

Hey, just leaving a thank you and first issue here. :)

Really helps me a lot right now. Planning to use this in an environment where servers post their current config state.

Do you accept donations?

[multiplemonomials]

Aww, thank you, it means a lot!

I while back I had to interact with some multicast stuff at my day job, and I was absolutely shocked with:

• (a) the lack of any coherent documentation on how to use multicast, especially across different OSs
• (b) the lack of any wrapper library, Python or otherwise, to make using multicast manageable

So, I set out to fix this problem by making multicast_expert, with the goal of (1) being an example of how to use multicast on each major platform, and (2) making multicast easy for Python users. It took quite a lot of trial and error (found a completely incorrect piece of socket option documentation on Win32, and someone still needs to explain the behavior of multicast IPv6 on Linux to me), but I was able to get it working on the end! Testing on multiple machines on a real network proved to be really invaluable.

I'm not currently looking for donations, but if you want, I'll tell you the number 1 risk factor I'm worried about. multicast_expert could not possibly work without the netifaces library, which handles the even more nitty-gritty part of interfacing with the OS and querying network interface information. (the main reason this is needed is, some multicast APIs require the interface IP address while others require the interface index, and this library is the only way to convert between them). However, this package has been abandoned and without a maintainer for several years now. The most visible effect is that, since no one is uploading wheels for it, installing multicast_expert on Python 3.10 or up will cause a netifaces build from source, which is a huge production on Windows especially. But also, if anyone were to find a serious issue in netifaces, there would be no way to get it fixed!

If you want to thank me, the best possible thing you could do would be to try and help find a new maintainer for netifaces. That library needs help! I realize that's a lot to ask, but I just wanted to get this here on record in case anyone else is wondering. And thank you for your kind words!

-Jamie