I have been reading over the changes here and it all looks brilliant. Did not yet pull and test them manually.

I have one question you are making changes to a number of public functions very dramatically... what back-porting, or warning of change, do we have for those who have used those. As they are public, and therefore it does have a measure of promise, right?

There are more... but I think you get my question. Not that I don't agree the changes are valid. Just indeed going to break stuff. Besides the fact that the whole class has mutated...

Those name changes do no harm, as method names are not case sensitive. The readability, though, is better with uppercase IP.

The refactoring (and the added tests) changed the CRAP index from 8190 down to 53... Some parts of the original code were never able to run; it was trying to treat a netmask as an integer for IPv6 ranges...

Yea, I get that... just trying to catch the guys like me who may have started using these methods directly...

API was restricted to the public methods; the class originally was final, so protected members were not accessible from outside.