Re: [musl] Proposal to match behaviour of gethostbyname to glibc

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 10:46:48PM +0100, Wolf wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> today I've noticed difference in behavior of gethostbyname in musl and
> in glibc. Given /etc/hosts
> 
> 	127.0.0.1   foo.bar foo
> 	127.0.0.1   bar.foo foo
> 
> and simple test program
> 
> 	#include <netdb.h>
> 	#include <stdio.h>
> 
> 	int main(int argc, char **argv) {
> 		struct hostent *he = gethostbyname(argv[1]);
> 		printf("Hostname: %s\n", he->h_name);
> 	}
> 
> , I've run it both under musl (alpine) and glibc (archlinux).
> 
> musl:
> 
> 	/test # ./test foo
> 	Hostname: bar.foo
> 
> glibc:
> 
> 	[root@foo test]# ./test foo
> 	Hostname: foo.bar
> 
> I don't think there is an actual reason to iterate through all of the
> /etc/hosts and first match can be returned instead. Following patch
> should in my opinion fix this.
> 
> 
> 
> diff --git a/src/network/lookup_name.c b/src/network/lookup_name.c
> index c93263a9..da8db9d4 100644
> --- a/src/network/lookup_name.c
> +++ b/src/network/lookup_name.c
> @@ -87,7 +87,10 @@ static int name_from_hosts(struct address buf[static MAXADDRS], char canon[stati
>                 for (; *p && isspace(*p); p++);
>                 for (z=p; *z && !isspace(*z); z++);
>                 *z = 0;
> -               if (is_valid_hostname(p)) memcpy(canon, p, z-p+1);
> +               if (is_valid_hostname(p)) {
> +                       memcpy(canon, p, z-p+1);
> +                       break;
> +               }
>         }
>         __fclose_ca(f);
>         return cnt ? cnt : badfam;
> 
> 
> 
> While this is admittedly edge case that most users will not run into, I
> still think it would be nice to behave the same way as glibc does on
> this one. And as a bonus, it will be *tiny* bit faster, since there
> would not be any need to iterate rest of the /etc/hosts file.
> 
> 
> 
> Thank you for considering this,

Patch does not apply as submitted (your mail software corrupted it in
the message body; for future reference, use attachment if you don't
have patch-clean mail software) but I'll apply it manually. Thanks.

Rich