On Feb 27, 2012, at 3:50 PM, William Herrin wrote: > On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 3:43 PM, david raistrick <dr...@icantclick.org> wrote: >> On Mon, 27 Feb 2012, William Herrin wrote: >>> In some cases this is because of carelessness: The application does a >>> gethostbyname once when it starts, grabs the first IP address in the >>> list and retains it indefinitely. The gethostbyname function doesn't >>> even pass the TTL to the application. Ntpd is/used to be one of the >>> notable offenders, continuing to poll the dead address for years after >>> the server moved. >> >> While yes it often is carelessness - it's been reported by hardcore >> development sorts that I trust that there is no standardized API to obtain >> the TTL... What needs to get fixed is get[hostbyname,addrinfo,etc] so >> programmers have better tools. > > Meh. What should be fixed is that connect() should receive a name > instead of an IP address. Having an application deal directly with the > IP address should be the exception rather than the rule. Then, deal > with the TTL issues once in the standard libraries instead of > repeatedly in every single application. > > In theory, that'd even make the app code protocol agnostic so that it > doesn't have to be rewritten yet again for IPv12. >
While I agree with the principle of what you are trying to say, I would argue that it should be dealt with in getnameinfo() / getaddrinfo() and not connect(). It is perfectly reasonable for connect() to deal with an address structure. If people are not using getnameinfo()/getaddrinfo() from the standard libraries, then, I don't see any reason to believe that they would use connect() from the standard libraries if it incorporated their functionality. Owen
