Subject: Re: BIND 8.3.5
To: None <tech-net@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Luke Mewburn <lukem@netbsd.org>
List: tech-net
Date: 06/03/2003 18:02:09
On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 04:49:10PM +0900, itojun@iijlab.net wrote:
  | >> Subject: BIND 8.3.5
  | >> 	BIND 8.3.5 will be imported to main trunk soon.
  | >including the resolver?  :-)
  | 
  | 	i really want to, but there were lots of rants.

I don't consider wanting to retain backward API and ABI
compatibility with previous NetBSD releases as "rants"...  

Just replacing the internals of our BIND4 res_*() with BIND8
res_*(), assuming that retains API/ABI backwards compat for
callers of those, shouldn't be a problem, should it?


Wholesale replacement of our get*by*() front-end functions
with the BIND8/9 versions which use IRS instead of our
nsswitch API (and ABI) in the back-end is not acceptable.

IIRC; the main reason I've seen for the latter proposal is
to provide thread safety, which BTW, is *NOT* required for
gethostbyname() et al, only gethostbyname_r() and other specific
thread-safe functions.

FWIW: I have been provided with the thread-safety fixes to
nsswitch that FreeBSD did, which I need to examine and incorporate
into our libc, which should fix that issue.

Luke.