(usagi-users 03701) Re: glibc getaddrinfo can resolve addresses of different hosts in case of search domains are used in /etc/resolv.conf - bug or feature?

[JINMEI Tatuya / 神明達哉 <jinmei@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> On Tue, 22 Aug 2006 14:00:31 +0200, 
>>>>> Peter Bieringer <pb@xxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

> Currently, it can return IPv6 and IPv4 addresses of different hosts,
> depending what happen during AAAA lookups while appending a search
> domain. If successful, application gets back e.g.

>  AAAA fec0::1 (www.redhat.com.intranet.domain.example)
>  A 66.187.224.150 (www.redhat.com)

> Not good, if application prefers IPv6...it connects unexpected to the
> wrong host.

I agree that this behavior is not good, but I'm not sure if I would
call it a bug.  To me, a bug is something that makes the program crash
or a behavior that is against the program/protocol/API specification.
In this case, since the getaddrinfo() specification (per RFC3493)
doesn't say anything about this level of 'consistency', I'm afraid we
cannot call the behavior a bug in the sense of specification
violation.  (And I would actually not expect the getaddrinfo() spec to
have this level of detail; the internal resolver behavior is a
black-box for getaddrinfo()).

So my vote is that this is
  a suboptimal feature, which is better to be changed.

					JINMEI, Tatuya
					Communication Platform Lab.
					Corporate R&D Center, Toshiba Corp.
					jinmei@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx