IPv6 Support

Hi,

We're working on a migration into a new infrastructure which uses IPv6
exclusively internally, so our back-end application servers do not
have IPv4 addresses other than a loopback address. Although we access
our indexes directly from the filesystem we use replication to
maintain real-time standby copies and to allow us to take consistent
backups from the replicated copies.

We're running on Debian Bullseye using the packages from the main
Debian repositories, as of now version 1.4.18-3. I see the comments on
https://trac.xapian.org/ticket/374 suggest that IPv6 support for the
network features may be coming in 1.5 but isn't currently planned for
1.4.x due to concerns over backwards compatibility - unless perhaps
there's some demand :)

I appreciate that there isn't a huge demand for this feature, but I'd
appreciate an idea of how long it might be before this may be
available in a released version so that we can make a decision
internally here on how to work around this in the meantime. This might
include building some packages of our own that include the relevant
changes, so could potentially be useful to the project in terms of
testing.

Thanks,
Sam


-- 
Sam Pearson
Site Reliability Engineer
mySociety / SocietyWorks Ltd