Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> I read that bug report VERY carefully. Twice. There is *nothing* there that
> seems to have been fixed/addressed by .localdomain, except maybe a DNS
> timeout in Pierre's machine. Everything else deals with the hostname.
I don't have the stamina that you do, so I've only read random bits of
it a half-dozen times. The localhost.localdomain does seems to kind of
appear out of the blue half way through and looks very likely to have
been glommed in with the rest of the changes by mistake. It's hard to
tell looking back at the history.
Anyway, please bear in mind that it's very easy for me to go in and
change this line of code:
fprintf(fp, "127.0.0.1\tlocalhost.localdomain\tlocalhost\n");
To this:
fprintf(fp, "127.0.0.1\tlocalhost\n");
But it's then very hard to see if this breaks anything. After all, the
relevant change was made in netcfg in July of 2004. For an entire year,
it was in every system installed, and nobody complained, although a few
of us noticed it and thought it looked a bit strange. Debian released
and for months after the release nobody apparently saw fit to complain
or report any problems until this thread.
If I make any changes, I don't want to have them pop up and result in
another thread like this[1] in 1.5 years time when we're trying to release,
or have just released, etch. Also, I don't pretend to be any kind of
expert on the absurdly fragile and unintuitive behavior the system
exhibits with different flavours of localhost entry in the /etc/hosts
file. I'm just a guy who happens to know where the code is and how to
change if it I get a clear explanation of why it's broken and why a
given change is thuroughly correct.
So far, this thread has not yeilded anything I can trust to that degree.
Of course this change doesn't have to go through me. Joshua Kwan has
maintained netcfg in less busy times in his life. Thomas Hood comes as
close as any developer does to "owning" Debian's local resolver setup.
Pulling them into a discussion about this would be a very productive
thing to do. They'd probably be a lot more willing to look at the issues
in depth and quickly make an appropriate change.
Oh yeah, I should point out that I've been seeing various programs in
Debian not properly work with various /etc/hosts settings for at least
ten years. I belive that the typical thing a sysadmin does when their
current /etc/hosts setting breaks some program is to change it to
somerthing else, wait for the next thing to break, and ignore the
problem otherwise. So I don't think this is necessarily really a new
problem, and I don't know that there is actually a fix that fixes all
the problems, and I understand why we don't seem to get any feedback
evne if it's broken. :-/
--
see shy jo
[1] Especially not given the quantity of whining, hot air, uninformed
comments, stupid comparisons to red hat, etc that have made portions
of this thread such a positive joy to read.
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