Jessie goals, and /etc/host.conf

[Gordon Haverland <ghaverla@materialisations.com>]

I wrote a note to my LUG about the use of /etc/hosts to lessen the 
chance of visiting some types of web sites, and got a reply saying 
that /etc/host.conf was deprecated.  And a long time ago.

I'm running unstable, surely if /etc/host.conf was deprecated I 
would have seen a note about it in the past?  And yet, it is still 
on my computer, and still part of base-files.

A bit more than a year ago, I ran the OpenWRT ImageBuilder process 
against every package they had registered.  I never did a "clean".  
I think only 20 packages failed to build.

I think this OpenWRT tree is a reasonable facsimilie for a Debian 
tree.

I recently ran a find against any ordinary file in that tree, 
looking for 'host.conf' (using fgrep).  I got 118 hits.  Some 
mistakes (host.conf was part of a file name).

There were hits on documentation, and I suspect in most part that 
documentation is obsolete.

I big chunk of the hits were (what appeared to me to be) user 
programs.  User programs to configure /etc/host.conf make sense, 
if /etc/host.conf is being used.  But why else would a user 
program need /etc/host.conf?

Gord