Re: Bogus getaddrinfo(3) on Darwin 9.2.2

[Ludovic Courtès]

Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> writes:

> address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
>> What I meant to say is that it should return an error because resolving
>> the ‘does-not-exist’ service fails.
>
> Does it only fail (well, falsely succeed) for unknown services?

When asked for a host name that does not resolve, it returns an error,
as expected.

>> The key piece of info here is port = 0, which makes no sense.
>
> Right, although I don't see a requirement in the getaddrinfo
> documentation to fail if the service is not known, nor what it actually
> means for a service to be "known" at all.

Well, yeah, it doesn’t seem to be a requirement.

Then again, what would be the point of ‘EAI_NONAME’ and ‘EAI_SERVICE’ if
it weren’t used in such cases?

And what’s the point of returning port = 0 for an unknown service?  It
can only make programs fail gracelessly (e.g., connect() eventually
fails) instead of providing a useful error message.

>>>> If it is indeed a bug, should we try to work around it in Gnulib?
>>>> Any idea how this could be done?
>>>
>>> Given that this is a bug (which isn't clear to me yet), we could work
>>> around it.
>>
>> I agree in principle, of course, but I can’t think of a way to work
>> around that since we’ll always have to rely on libc at one point or
>> another.
>
> It should be possible to look up services in other ways (getservbyname),
> right?

Yes, but what if getservbyname is similarly broken?  That wouldn’t be
surprising if these functions are factorized.

> If you use the getaddrinfo replacement in gnulib on that system,
> doesn't it produce correct results?

It’s not used by default.  How can I force it to be used?

(Note that I don’t have access to that machine myself, so I’m relying on
a kind contributor.)

>>> But it is also not clear to me that the test-case above indicate a
>>> useful way of using getaddrinfo, what kind of application uses
>>> parameters like that, and what result did you expect?
>>
>> An error, because the service name doesn’t resolve.
>
> What if the system is configured (or programmed) to resolve all services
> names?  Isn't that a valid POSIX compliant getaddrinfo implementation?
> It's not particular useful one, I admit.

But then a given program wouldn’t be able to do anything useful with it.
For instance, getaddrinfo ("host", "http") would be useless if the
resulting port were not 80, because clients elsewhere may still get 80,
because that’s what IANA has always said.

Thanks,
Ludo’.