Raymond solicited a comment from me about the design of ipaddr. By way of full disclosure, I have a small competing project called pynet. That said, I test drove ipaddr for about 30 minutes and so far like the big-picture API design quite a bit. I'll specifically address Clay's concern about hosts vs networks, because this issue is important to me; I've been in the network engineering field for over 15 years, worked on Cisco's product development team, and held a CCIE (consider it the equivalent of a CPA for network engineers) for 10 years... Clay seems to object to ipaddr's IP object because it is not the same as the object model used in the BSD ip stack. Indeed, I'm one of the raving fans of what BSD has done for the quality of ip networking, but let's also consider their requirements. BSD must approach ip networking from a host perspective, it is the consumer of individual IP packets and their payloads. ipaddr's whole point of existence is really driven towards the manipulation of potentially massive lists of ip addresses. This is no small difference in requirements, and I believe ipaddr's different approach makes their code much simpler for the tasks it needs to do. Incorporating host addresses as a special case of a /32 IPv4 network or /128 IPv6 network makes a lot of sense to me, in fact, I also chose this same object model. Perl's NetAddr::IP does this too, it is considered the gold standard for perl's address manipulation module. Whether python includes ipaddr now, later, or uses another module entirely does not bother me. Whatever is included should have a very stable API, and major bugs should be worked out. Documentation should be good enough for the average consumer, and if anything this is where ipaddr to be lacking a bit. I hope that python does include something to manipulate IPv4 and IPv6 address blocks in the future, since this is a big hole is python's batteries-included philosophy. However, I'd need more time at the wheel of ipaddr before I could comment whether this truly is ready for inclusion in stdlib. All the best, \m