I would like to introduce in classpath a concept which used to be in kaffe but was recently removed because of the merging with classes from classpath: DNS solver modularity. Previously it was possible to specify to kaffe (using -Ddns.resolve=class or something like this). That used to give an advantage: use a native method (using e.g. gethostbyname) or a Java method to resolve internet name. The java method is already implemented and we can get a lot of other useful insights to resolved name than we can get with gethostbyname. As the code to add if fairly simple (add an interface and a if branch at class initialization), I think it can be added painlessly.
I think we want to stick with always using the OS's gethostbyname(). This ensures that the OS settings for name resolution get respected by Java - I suspect things like /etc/hosts, and other name resolution schemes like zeroconf/rendevous, etc may not get recognized by a Java resolver without additional Java-specific configuration.
The "additional insights" would certainly be useful for applications that need to integrate tightly with DNS, however I don't think it would be useful or neccessary to put this inside InetAddress itself - no more information can be obtained given the existing InetAddress interface, right?
Surely it would be better to put this code in its own class under gnu.* somewhere? Note that external resolvers can now easily create InetAddress objects using the JDK 1.4 getByAddress() methods, which are already implemented in classpath.
Regards
Bryce.
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