[Hostname-devel] hostname -s behaviour should be consistent with other unixes (and with documentation)

[Cristian Greco]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 05:39:35AM -0400, Jiri Popelka wrote:

> Dear Debian Hostname Team,
> 
> I'm net-tools and hostname (we have hostname still in net-tools package)
> package maintainer in Red Hat.
> I'd like to consult some bug (feature request) with you.

Hi Jiri,

I'm a co-maintainer for hostname in Debian.

Thanks for your mail, I'm pleased you got in contact with us.

> As you can see in
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=319981
> the reporter of the bug claims that
> hostname -s
> on a host with a hostname that does not resolve in the DNS
> behaves in one way on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and on Debian as I tried)
> and in the other way on FreeBSD/OpenBSD/AIX/MacOsX.
> 
> On RHEL(Fedora) and Debian when the hostname does not resolve in the DNS
> hostname -s
> returns "hostname: Unknown host" message.
> 
> On FreeBSD/OpenBSD/AIX/MacOsX when the hostname does not resolve in the DNS
> hostname -s
> returns (according to the reporter) short host name (no matter if the hostname resolves or not).
> 
> I'm ready to change the hostname -s functionality to make the behaviour consistent with
> other versions of unix (*BSD, AIX, MacOsX, ...) but only in case you decide to change it too,
> so it will be consistent also with Debian (and Debian based distros).
> 
> Fix should be easy and I'm adding proposed patch.
> 
> Also found bug on launchpad
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hostname/+bug/389602
> where reporter also says that:
> "The documentation states that -s just trims the domain off if it exists, but that's not what it does.
> Either it should behave exactly that way or the doc should be updated."
> 
> So what do you think about it ?
> Should I fill a bug on http://bugs.debian.org/hostname so we can track our discussion on this topic ?
> 
> Thanks for your suggestions

I'm ok with this change, but please file a bug just to be sure interested
people can step up to discuss.

Thanks,
--
Cristian Greco
GPG key ID: 0x0C095825 
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