no libidn/ in glibc-2.9

[Dan Nicholson]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 5:51 AM, Matthew Burgess
<matthew at linuxfromscratch.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:46:16 +0100 (MET), Alexander Kozlov <akozlov at nada.kth.se> wrote:
>>
>> You are right, libidn is not mentioned in the book, my fault.
>> There is libidn/ directory in the snapshot source tree which is
>> absent in glibc-2.9 release. Is this something to worry about?
>
> No, I don't think so.  From the comment in the book source, most packages require the
> libidn package from GNU (see BLFS for instructions), rather than Glibc's
> implementation.  So, the fact that Glibc's libidn directory is missing is unlikely to
> affect anything, I think.

The point of having libidn in glibc is not to expose it to
applications. It's to add support for reading internationalized domain
names from nss (i.e., libnss_dns). Then all your normal C calls like
gethostbyname work with internationalized names.

However, I would guess that most applications that want to deal with
internationalized domain names don't expect to have that support from
the system's C libraries. Instead, they'd probably link against the
standalone version.

So, it probably doesn't hurt that bad, but it is a useful feature that
should probably be kept.

--
Dan