On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:03:12 +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > On 2009-12-28 23:41:38 +0000, Sam Morris wrote: >> Details in <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=316099>. I >> do wonder, however, why the system hostname has to appear in /etc/hosts >> at all? Programs that want to find it out can read /etc/hostname >> directly, after all. And wtf is 'localdomain' for, anyway? > > Programs may need the FQDN, even without any network connection (for > instance, even local mail messages should have a Message-Id). And > /etc/hostname doesn't necessarily contain the FQDN.
Hm, but shouldn't they use another method to get it? My laptop has no FQDN when it is not connected to a network, and even when it is, it has never, to my knowledge, had a fully qualified name that could be resolved to find out its network address. Conversely, I have used servers that had multiple network interfaces, some of which even have multiple network addresses assigned to them. 'hostname -f' did not yield a sensible result on a couple of these systems. What would a hypothetical host that only had IPv6 connectivity do? We certainly don't have a line analogous to the '127.0.1.1' hack in /etc/ hosts for ipv6, and I'm not even sure what such a line would look like, since ::1 has a /128 netmask. As for mail, we already appear to have an /etc/mailname file for MTAs and MUAs to use for finding out the 'canonical' name of the host for message- IDs and the like. > Also, it is required that the FQDN be resolvable (but I wonder whether > this is useful in practice). -- Sam Morris -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
