From: Michael N. Lipp (mnl@dtro.e-technik.th-darmstadt.de)
Date: 01/01/93


From: mnl@dtro.e-technik.th-darmstadt.de (Michael N. Lipp)
Subject: libc.so.4.2 Caveats!
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1993 00:29:19 GMT

I have experienced two major problems with the new libc.so.4.2. (Note that
I started my Linux with SLS .98p5)

1) The new library has an improved "gethostbyname". A new file
   /usr/etc/inet/host.conf is used to set options. If this file is missing,
   a file containing a single line

     order bind

   is assumed. This means that ONLY DNS is used to resolve hostnames. Your
   /usr/etc/inet/hosts is never consulted! As I don't have the named
   running, I had to create a file /usr/etc/inet/host.conf containing
   the line

     order hosts

   Actually, you can have

     order hosts nis bind

   or any other combination. I did not try to find out about the other
   keywords that can be used in host.conf from the source. Perharps
   whoever wrote the new version can post a little doc.

2) sed doesn't work any more. I have recompiled it using FSF sed-1.13.tar.Z.
   Strange enough, although I removed the sed-local regex.o getop.o and
   getopt1.o (thus using the functions in libc.so.4.2) and compiled with
   -O2, my new sed is about twice as large as the old one. Was it not
   FSF sed-1.13 in the SLS distribution?

Hope that helps.

Michael