I say, have said, and will say a lot of negative things about IPv6 deployment and usability. I'm on record as believing that large scale IPv6 usage will cause lots of problems in the field, with all sorts of weird failures and broken software (and some software that is not broken as such but is IPv4 only), and that in practice lots of people will be very slow to update to IPv6 and there will be plenty of IPv4 only places for, oh, the next decade or more.

But let me say something explicitly: despite all that, I believe that IPv6 is the inevitable future of the Internet. IPv6 solves real problems, those problems are getting more acute over time, the deployment momentum is there, and and sooner or later people will upgrade. I don't have any idea of how soon this will happen ('not soon' is probably still a good bet), but over time it's clear that more and more traffic on the Internet will be IPv6, despite all of the warts and pain involved. The transition will be slow, but at this point I believe it's long since become inevitable.

(Whether different design and deployment decisions could have made it happen faster is an academically interesting question but probably not one that can really be answered today, although I have my doubts.)

This doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to go all in on moving to IPv6. I still have all my old cautions and reluctance about that. I continue to think that the shift will be a bumpy road and I'm not eager to rush into it. But I do think that I should probably be working more on it than I currently am. I would like not to be on the trailing edge, and sooner or later there are going to be IPv6 only services that I want to use.

(IPv6 only websites and other services are probably inevitable but I don't know how soon we can expect them. Anything popular will probably be a sign of the trailing edge, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a certain sort of tech-oriented website go IPv6 only earlier than that as a way of making a point.)

As a result, I now feel that I should be working to move my software and my environment towards using IPv6, or at least being something that I can make IPv6 enabled. In part this means looking at programs and systems I'm using that are IPv4 only and considering what to do about them. Hopefully it will also mean making a conscious effort not to write IPv4 only code in the future, even if that code is easier.

(I would say 'old programs', but I have recently written something that's sort of implicitly IPv4 only because it contains embedded assumptions about eg doing DNS blocklist lookups.)

Probably I should attempt to embark on another program of learning about IPv6. I've tried that before, but it's proven to have the same issue for me as learning computer languages; without an actual concrete project, I just can't feel motivated about learning the intricacies of IPv6 DHCP and route discovery and this and that and the other. But probably I can look into DNS blocklists in the world of IPv6 and similar things; I do have a project that could use that knowledge.