Hi,
Function gethostbyname() is a known POSIX flaw. It used not to be possible to perform non-blocking calls to the resolver.
Martin lists the following options:
0- just suffer; or rather tell people to fix their nameserver or turn down the timeout in resolv.conf
Martin thinks this is the best option.
1- use resolv.h, which can take a timeout but might be nonportable
That's a bad idea, header resolv.h is part of BIND which covers only DNS. Hosts are not always listed in a DNS server. They may be listed in NIS or LDAP servers. NIS is sometimes used where I work for example.
2- use an asynchronous DNS library; should be easy but adds another dependency and/or thing that must be bundled
Is there such a library? One that also covers NIS servers and such? On the other hand there are proposals for an asynchronous lookup framework:
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/asynchnl.pdf
Why not use getaddrinfo_a() on platforms where it's available? I'm pretty sure there are some autoconf macros that cover this function.
3- run lookups in a separate process, which can be killed off (a bit gross)
Note that mozilla uses lookups in a separate process, so that option may be gross but it can't be that bad.
--
Dimitri Papadopoulos
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