Re: CVS commit: src/bin/hostname

["Roland C. Dowdeswell" <elric%imrryr.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 05:05:55AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
>

> If you *want* to use a FQDN as your hostname I see no problem with it
> (apparently it makes Kerberos work better/at all) but I don't think it
> should be required, expected, or even encouraged.

Well, I think that while we ship software that works in a particular
way, we should note the requirements in the likely sorts of places that
people will look for documentation.  Postfix as an example expects that
either gethostname(2) returns a FQDN or that /etc/postfix/main.cf has
the myhostname or mydomain defined.  Now, we could rely on the postfix
documentation to call this out, but it is perhaps a little more user
friendly to mention this sort of thing in other places where they are
likely to look when deciding what to set the hostname to be.

So, although I agree that we should not place a requirement that
the hostname as configured in the kernel be an FQDN, we should note
that some software expects it to be one and that your mileage may
vary to some degree if it isn't one.

And, we may very well also want to consider how we want to handle
the hostname in software that we ship either in base or perhaps in
pkgsrc to make sure that it is consistent.

>  > ps: all those new args to hostname(1) should be removed,
> 
> That said, I agree with this part.
> 
> As somebody else pointed out earlier, most of the time when programs
> attempt to fetch a FQDN from the hostname or by looking up the
> hostname they're doing something silly or wrong.

This, of course, is the main point of the thread, the new args to
hostname.  I also agree that the new args should be removed.

It does, of course, leave one in a situation where if you want to
use a short name for hostname(1) then what process should be used
to determine an FQDN if an FQDN is desired which avoids silliness
with the resolver.  I'd suggest that we simply state that some
software that we ship either in base or pkgsrc works a bit better
if you use a hostname which meets a number of basic requirements
such as being an FQDN.

--
    Roland Dowdeswell                      http://Imrryr.ORG/~elric/