"Jacques A. Vidrine" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > OTOH I don't think that an arbitrarily long hostname makes much > sense.
Really? Have you seen proposals for handling internet growth? Hostnames are already getting longer and longer. I was once at "unmvax". Then that became "unmvax.unm.edu". Now my laptop has the attractive address "vp190095.reshsg.uci.edu". Indeed, BSD added a field to utmp for the remote host name, and that field (go figure) was something like 12 characters, and so major hassle ensued to make it bigger. > I don't accept that this is the only correct thing to do. Another way is to have an interface to fetch the length of the hostname first, and then allocate a suitably sized buffer, or else use an interface that allocates its own buffer. > I was quite happy to have the problem (with MAXHOSTNAMELEN) pointed > out. I am not happy to add new complexity to applications for no > gain. What about the gain of Posix compliance? Two messages ago, you were insisting that Posix said you were right. And then, when Posix actually says you're wrong, now what? Posix is no longer worth attention? > It is laudable that you want to do away with `arbitrary limits', and > it is laudable that you (apparently) want to be POSIX-compliant. I > think it is shameful, however, that the Hurd will not define > MAXHOSTNAMELEN or even HOST_NAME_MAX: this seems to be biting the > thumb at portability. We HAVE no limit. Why should we invent one? What need is there to deliberately break our system? > For gethostname, one can use it in a manner that is portable, > POSIX-compliant, and simple by using the appropriate constant (which > is defined by the OS). Unlike the case with pathnames, there does not > seem to be any benefit in adding complexity to support lengths longer > than the minimum specified by POSIX. It's not Posix compliant if you code only works when HOST_NAME_MAX is defined, because Posix *explicitly* allows it not to be defined when it would not make sense to on a particular system. > I don't really have a `problem' with implementing functionality > similar to xgethostname -- I just think that it is rather silly to > jump through such hoops for a basic operation. Then can we please do that? It is just more flexible all round. > Lastly, this in no way means that it acceptable for Heimdal to be > broken on the Hurd. It will be fixed one way or another. Good! I'm glad we agree about the most important things. :) _______________________________________________ Bug-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-hurd
