Keith Moore wrote:
My argument is not that link-local addresses should be returned by getaddrinfo() , it is that getaddrinfo() should be transparent.
Completely agree. The getaddrinfo() should be completely transparent from programmers' point of view. The local setup should be system/environment specific. I think the cleanest solution would be to setup the DNS resolution order locally by administrator: IPv6 address-resolution enable, and order of IPv4/IPv6 address-resolution. In my opinion, this should be included the resolver code and configurable from resolv.conf.
what you are describing is not transparent to applications that actually
need to know what is in DNS.
So there seem to be at least two alternatives:
* Change/fix the definition of getaddrinfo()/getnameinfo() so they
are tied to DNS only but nothing else.
* Keep the current semantics of those functions, then update and
standarize an API that strictly queries DNS only (res_XXX() and
dn_XXX() comes to mind first; if they fall short of what real
applications need, we could always define a new superset).Perhaps it'd be desirable to see some actual figures; how much percentage of the applications out there that use gethostbyXXX()/getaddrinfo()/getnameinfo() would assume those functions look up DNS records *only*, and would be severely broken if they were given results not based on DNS.
If most of the applications would be broken, it would certainly be worth the trouble to go for the first option (this means going through the lengthy process of updating POSIX as well, because these functions are specified in it too).
However, my impression was that a vast majority of applications out there use the functions in their original semantics (i.e. as a shorthand facility for specifying human-readable text form of addresses, not as a frontend interface for DNS only but nothing else), e.g. `ping6 www.kame.net' certainly wouldn't care if the IPv6 address getaddrinfo() returns comes from DNS, NIS, or any other mechanism.
I'd gladly stand corrected if there are statistics that say otherwise.
My 20 Korean Wons (1 USD ~= 1200 KRW last time I checked :p), Eugene
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