>>>>> On Tue, 3 Jun 2003 19:00:33 +1000, Luke Mewburn <lukem@netbsd.org> said:

>   | 	well, freebsd *hostent (gethostbyht.c) does not look thread safe to me.
>   | 	NIS logic too.  do you have time to work on these?

> gethostent() does not have to be thread safe:
> 	http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xns/endhostent.html

Furthermore, gethostent_r() in the IRS implementation is incompatible
with existing implementations like Solaris or glibc.

The current position of gethostent_r() within an enumeration on
Solaris and glibc is a process-wide property which is shared by all
threads.
But current position of gethostent_r() in the IRS library is a
thread-specific property, and it is not shared by other threads.

Because applications which uses gethostent_r() usually assume
Solaris/glibc behavior, the IRS implementation is not only useless,
but also dangerous because it provides different semantics with
same function name.
--
soda