Re: Call for help on improving the documentation

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On , September 21, 2000 at 18:37:09 (-0700), Russ Allbery wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Call for help on improving the documentation
>
>  * SysV systems (e.g. Solaris) often don't have hstrerror.

hstrerror is part of libresolv and any system which has a libresolv too
old to have hstrerror will likely have many many other resolver bugs too.

Similarly the functions inet_net_ntop() and inet_net_pton() will be
missing (they were introduced prior to BIND-4.9.5-P1 for goodness sake!!).

The best solution for any application that needs DNS is to simply
require that the user upgrade their resolver first (eg. install
BIND-8.2.2-P5 or whatever's newest).  Anything else is shooting yourself
in the ankles.....

As for how autoconf can ensure it's found the newest resolver library
available on a system, well that's probably best left for a '--with'
parameter if the default search path doesn't find a viable -lresolv.

Note too that recent BIND-8's resolver library is called -lbind.

>  * SunOS didn't have strerror, IIRC.  I no longer have any SunOS
>    machines.

SunOS-4 didn't IIRC, which suggests 4.2BSD didn't.  4.3BSD definitely
did though.

If you're linking against BIND-8's resolver you get it for free though! ;-)


>  * Some really old systems may not have getopt; I'm not sure which ones
>    fall into that category.

everything back to, and including, SysIII has getopt().  I don't think
4.2BSD had it, but it's in 4.3BSD for sure.  AT&T PD'd the code for one
of their versions in 1985.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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