- From: Paul A Vixie <paul@vix.com>
- Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 12:30:12 -0800
- 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
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.
Received on Wednesday, 27 March 1996 12:35:35 UTC