Re: gethostbyname (was Re: (DNS) draft wording for W.G. review. )

So how do you find out what the current state of the Posix standard is 
and how do you provide input to them?

Donald

On Wed, 27 Mar 1996, Paul A Vixie wrote: 

> Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 12:30:12 -0800
> From: Paul A Vixie <paul@vix.com>
> To: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee@cybercash.com>
> Cc: hallam@w3.org, Anawat Chankhunthod <chankhun@catarina.usc.edu>,
>     http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com, iip@tis.com
> Subject: Re: gethostbyname (was Re: (DNS) draft wording for W.G. review. ) 
> 
> gethostbyname() is part of the BSD System Interface and we can't change it
> lightly.  Note that it is very general, pertaining equally well to NIS and
> /etc/hosts as to DNS -- therefore widening it to include authentication or
> TTL information would be irrelevant and possibly incorrect.
> 
> I am anxious to make progress on a DNS-specific host name lookup function
> that can be optimized for the kinds of data that DNS has available.  But
> gethostbyname() is not even the beginning of that answer.  Neither, for
> that matter, is getconninfo() or whatever else Posix.12 specifies.
> 
> The right place for this battle to take place is actually Posix.12, since
> applications will in the long term just call getconninfo() (or whatever),
> and if we want those applications to care about authentication and TTL, we
> need to make that argument _now_ while the interface is still malleable.
> 
> 

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