Re: IDN hostname resolution in NetBSD

[Matthew Mondor <mm_lists%pulsar-zone.net@localhost>]

On Fri, 28 May 2010 00:50:34 -0400
Geoff Adams <gadams+netbsd%avernus.com@localhost> wrote:

> The in-kernel hostname, ideally, should be in something like Unicode (as 
> UTF-8 would be nice), and only DNS-resolving software would need to worry 
> about the conversion to punycode. Of course, there's a lot of DNS-aware 
> software out there. How much of it is also aware of the local hostname? 
> Certainly, MTAs are.
> 
> And, of course, this also brings up all the issues of what encoding the 
> user's locale is set to, the other issues Chris brought up, and no doubt yet 
> others. It won't be a quick fix, but will take some careful planning and 
> coordination.

Since the cannonical representation is 7-bit ASCII (and the punnycode
representation also being a 7-bit encoding), shouldn't the kernel only
deal with 7-bit, and userland tools read utf-8 to utf-32/ubcs-32 as
necessary and then convert to punnycode as necessary?  Likewise, a
punnycode 7-bit encoded host would be converted to utf-32 and then to
utf-8 (or the user locale) by userland for presentation (of course,
those userland conversions could still be handled in libc, however)...
-- 
Matt