Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ingr!b11!dwig
From: dwig@b11.ingr.com (David Wiggins)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: connections to numeric host names
Message-ID: <8340@b11.ingr.com>
Date: 19 Jul 90 14:35:31 GMT
Organization: Intergraph Corp. Huntsville, AL
Lines: 23


We have a problem making X connections to hosts whose names are pure
numbers, e.g.  2020.  MakeTCPConnection (XConnDis.c) tries to use this
as an IP address instead of a host name.  This appears to succeed
(inet_addr does not return INVALID_INETADDR), but the connect fails
because there's no machine with that address on the network. 

What we'd like to do is change Xlib to interpret the hostname string as
a hostname first (via gethostbyname), and if there's no such host,
interpret it as an IP address (via inet_addr), effectively reversing the
order that Xlib currently uses.  Would this introduce any new problems?
I balk at changing the order because the following comment...

    /*
     * if numeric host name then try to parse it as such; do the number
     * first because some systems return garbage instead of INVALID_INETADDR
     */

...indicates that there was a good reason for the current order.  Anybody
understand what this comment means?

David P. Wiggins	dwig@ingr.com  or  uunet!ingr!dwig	(205)730-6365
Intergraph Corporation, One Madison Industrial Park, Huntsville, AL 35807