On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, codemastr wrote:

> I did a little research on the nsswitch.conf file. Adding support for the
> 'files bind' vs 'bind files' doesn't seem like it is too difficult, however
> the thing is this file seems to offer a lot more options than that. There
> seems to be some way to define 'criteria.' For example it seems as though
> you can do:
>
> hosts: files [SUCCESS=return UNAVAIL=return NOTFOUND=continue] dns
>
> In all there are four criteria, SUCCESS, UNAVAIL, NOTFOUND, TRYAGAIN. Any
> of these can either have the value of continue or return assigned. For more
> info, <http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/cgi-bin/man-cgi?nsswitch.conf+4>. Anyway
> though my point is, to fully support the /etc/nsswitch.conf file seems like
> it is actually a lot of work since this file seems to offer a great deal of
> configurability.

I was more thinking about getting some basic functionality added first, to be
able to extend it further in the future. Or don't you think that is
feasable/reasonable?

> Also as a side note, does anyone happen to know if Windows has such an
> option as well? I'd assume there is a way to tell it whether to use the
> C:\windows\hosts or the DNS server first just as nsswitch.conf seems to do.
> I'd guess (if Windows does have such a feature) that if nsswitch.conf
> support is added to c-ares, then the same function should be added for
> Windows as well.

Well, we could of course allow the Windows version to check for and use a
"C:\windows\nsswitch.conf" file (or similar) to accomplish this.

> By the way, I've read Frank Ticheler's email 3 times now, I can't see
> anywhere where he mentioned that the _default_ order should be changed. To
> me it seems like what he is requesting is that c-ares read the
> /etc/nsswitch.conf file and use whatever order is defined therein.

Right, but "files bind" is the standard default search order for name lookups
on all operating systems I know of, and thus we should use that order unless
stated otherwise.

-- 
    Daniel Stenberg -- http://curl.haxx.se/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/
   [[ Do not send mails to this email address. They won't reach me. ]]
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