On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 01:51:33PM -0500,
 Gary Thorpe <gathorpe79@yahoo.com> wrote 
 a message of 78 lines which said:

> I notice that whenever I contact some host under .netbsd.org
> (e.g. FTP) the DNS returns an IPv6 address first.

Yes. getaddrinfo does this by default.

> Shouldn't DNS requests from IPv4 requestors return IPv4 addresses by
> default

No, because DNS is typically relayed (from your NetBSD box to your
local cache/resolver and then to your ISP's cache/resolver) so the
authoritative name server cannot know if the original request came on
IPv4 or IPv6.

The issue was discussed at length at the IETF and, AFAIK, still does
not have a satisfactory solution. It is up to the application to fall
back to IPv4 properly.