Patch is against current CVS and adds two socket module
functions, inet_pton and inet_ntop.  Both of these
should be available on all platforms (because of other
dependancies in the code) so I don't think portability
is a problem.  inet_ntop converts a packed IP address
to a human-readable '.' or ':' separated string
representation of the IP.  inet_pton performs the
reverse operation.

(Potential) problems: inet_pton sets errno to ENOSPC,
which may lead to a confusing error message.