Re: what's the purpose of MAXHOSTNAMELEN?

[Vikram Dhillon <dhillonv10@gmail.com>]

I care about Hurd :D, but yah as it is mentioned before, would it
sometime in future be possible to remove this from the kernel ?

Regards,
Vikram Dhillon

~~~
There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but
only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.
-- Linus Torvalds



On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org> wrote:
> On 12/29/2009 02:56 PM, Samuel Thibault wrote:
>>
>> Jeff Garzik, le Tue 29 Dec 2009 14:40:05 -0500, a écrit :
>>>
>>> On 12/29/2009 02:19 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>>>
>>>> arch/s390/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN    64      /* max
>>>> length of hostname */
>>>>
>>>>   so lots of people define it but no one uses it.  it *is* exported to
>>>> user space in /usr/include/asm/param.h, but i still have no idea what
>>>> it's for in user space.  obsolete?
>>>
>>> According to RFC 1034, "Each node has a label, which is zero to 63
>>> octets in length"
>>
>> That's for Internet networks.  Other kinds of networks could implement
>> more.  It could make sense to restrict ourself to Internet standards,
>> but we don't :)
>
> Er huh?  That was a description of the origin of the limit.
>
> And as a point of fact, we do restrict ourself to that:
>
>        #define __NEW_UTS_LEN 64
>
>        struct new_utsname {
>                char sysname[__NEW_UTS_LEN + 1];
>                char nodename[__NEW_UTS_LEN + 1];
>
>
>
>>> What is it used for in userspace, and why is it export from the kernel?
>>
>> Gethostname, typically, but also all kinds of functions that provide a
>> hostname.  It's also quite often completely badly used, for instance for
>> getnameinfo()...
>>
>> You have Debian's list on
>> http://unstable.buildd.net/buildd/hurd-i386_Failed.html
>
> No one cares about Hurd.
>
>        Jeff
>
>
>
>
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