On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 5:51 AM, Matthew Burgess <matt...@linuxfromscratch.org> wrote: > On Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:46:16 +0100 (MET), Alexander Kozlov > <akoz...@nada.kth.se> wrote: >> >> You are right, libidn is not mentioned in the book, my fault. >> There is libidn/ directory in the snapshot source tree which is >> absent in glibc-2.9 release. Is this something to worry about? > > No, I don't think so. From the comment in the book source, most packages > require the > libidn package from GNU (see BLFS for instructions), rather than Glibc's > implementation. So, the fact that Glibc's libidn directory is missing is > unlikely to > affect anything, I think.
The point of having libidn in glibc is not to expose it to applications. It's to add support for reading internationalized domain names from nss (i.e., libnss_dns). Then all your normal C calls like gethostbyname work with internationalized names. However, I would guess that most applications that want to deal with internationalized domain names don't expect to have that support from the system's C libraries. Instead, they'd probably link against the standalone version. So, it probably doesn't hurt that bad, but it is a useful feature that should probably be kept. -- Dan -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
