* Joe Orton | But yes, testsockets.c will need some tweaking to cope with this | getaddrinfo implementation. I think it's caused by an Ubuntu patch, if | I read https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/netcfg/+bug/24828 | correctly. It might break some applications in fun ways too, but | there's not much APR can do about that.
FWIW, I have yet to see any bug reports about anything breaking with this, except testsockets.c. What the glibc patch does is it only returns IPv6 addresses if they are explicitly requested by the application or you have an IPv6 address with a scope of < link (that is, if you have site or global scope address). The reason for the patch is lots of cheap DSL routers seem to just not respond to AAAA or A6 queries, so applications would try to resolve a name, glibc would send out an AAAA query, wait for it to time out, then send out an A request instead of just getting a NXDOMAIN or similar back immediately. So, it's a hack for brokenness in lots of software which is not Ubuntu's, but it makes the user experience much better without breaking IPv6 for those who actually use it. Whether it should treat numeric addresses specifically is something I had not considered; maybe it should. I would be happy to receive feedback on this. On the other hand, I would suspect the number of people keying in IPv6 addresses into their applications and not having a site or global IPv6 address to be fairly small so real-world breakage should be limited. -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
