Re: LYNX-DEV Making lynx more portable and reliable

[Klaus Weide]

On Thu, 23 Oct 1997, John E. Davis wrote:

> On Thu, 23 Oct 1997 03:35:51 GMT, Victor Schneider <address@hidden> said:
> >What I'm going to suggest is an idea that makes the slrn news reader more
> >reliable:  Instead of calling `gethostbyname' and taking what it returns,
> >set up a loop to call gethostbyname several times until it either times out
> >or returns something.  It seems that not all internet providers and not all
> >wsock32.dll's are created equal.
> 
> He is referring to the following that I use for slrn:
> 
>    host_entry = NULL;
>    if (-1 != gethostname (host, MAX_HOST_NAME_LEN))
>      host_entry = gethostbyname (host);
> #if defined(TRY_AGAIN) && !defined(MULTINET)
>    if ((host_entry == NULL) && (h_errno == TRY_AGAIN))
>      {
>       sleep (2);
>       host_entry = gethostbyname (host);
>      }
> #endif
> 
> Basically, gethostbyname could return prematurely and set h_error to
> TRY_AGAIN.  The man page suggests that this is a temporary failure and
> that you should try the call again later, so I have it sleep for two
> seconds and try it one more time.

Is h_errno defined on all platforms (except with MULTINET) that have
a gethostbyname()?  Should this be added generally or just for some
platforms?  (It seems that it is not needed in general for Unix etc.,
otherwise there would be more lookup failures.)

     Klaus

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