gethostby* users

Richi Plana myfedora at richip.dhs.org
Fri Oct 12 23:05:30 UTC 2007


Hi, Ulrich.

On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 23:35 -0700, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> Even though the situation improved, there are still some programs left
> which use the gethostby* functions.  These really have to be converted
> to use getaddrinfo.  Here is the break-down per package of an incomplete
> installation giving the number of programs/libraries with problems in
> that package.  I.e., there are like more packages on an install-all
> machine.  The full list with the program/library names is at

Were you addressing your message to the maintainers of the software you
mentioned or to fedora developers and package maintainers?

For now, I'll assume you were addressing fedora developers in general so
I'll give my Can$0.02.

Would it make sense to address these individual packages and convert all
gethostby*(3) function calls to getaddrinfo(3)? It seems like an easy
enough task for anyone with a basic knowledge of C to work on (I tried
looking at talk-0.17-29.2.3.src.rpm as an example and it looks pretty
straightforward).

One approach I can think of is to go ahead and make these patches, apply
them to Fedora packages and submit them upstream to their corresponding
maintainers. If it gets applied upstream, the package maintainers can
rebase and drop the patch. If upstream says "no", then the patches can
be dropped and the software reverted.

I'm just worrying about the different platforms these software are
expected to run on. According to gethostbyname(3), the function conforms
to POSIX as well as 4.3BSD so certain platforms might not have support
for getaddrinfo(). What's the proper way of addressing these?
Preprocessor directives?
--

Richi Plana




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