Re: Proposed new scheme for resolving the system hostname
On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 18:08 +0200, GOMBAS Gabor wrote:
> As I written above the concept you mention is based on assumptions that
> were just convinient defaults at that time but were never granted. And
> they are simply not true nowadays.
There are applications in Debian that assume that the system hostname
can be resolved. You may be right when you say that these applications
*should not* make that assumption; but they *do* make it. Even the
"hostname" program provides an option that prints the result of running
gethostbyname() on the result of gethostname().
The current Debian installer deals with the assumption, imperfectly, by
putting the system hostname in /etc/hosts. My proposal aims to improve
that support.
An alternative to fixing support for the assumption is to decide that
applications should not make the assumption. We could add an article to
Debian policy forbidding applications to rely on the system hostname
being resolvable.
--
Thomas Hood <jdthood@aglu.demon.nl>
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