> I always wondered about that. In fact, I asked why we don't define it here > a year or so ago. POSIX says in gethostname() > > Host names are limited to 255 bytes. > > (at least in my recent draft). > > So doesn't it make sense for us to define this macro? All users of > MAXHOSTNAMELEN rely on the standard POSIX interface, so even if the Hurd > itself is not limited by this, those programs might rightly rely on this > limit and still claim POSIX compatibility. In fact, it seems if we want to > be POSIX compatible, we must not return hostnames longer than that limit, or?
I think that is reasonable. The was no POSIX standard specifying gethostname at the time the original decision was made.
