Opened 11 years ago

Closed 5 years ago

#10841 closed bug (no change required)

gethostid() is missing

Reported by: korli Owned by: nobody
Priority: normal Milestone: Unscheduled
Component: System/POSIX Version: R1/Development
Keywords: Cc:
Blocked By: Blocking:
Platform: All

Description

gethostid() is missing in unistd.h

​http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/gethostid.html

Change History (2)

comment:1 by luroh, 10 years ago

Milestone: R1 → Unscheduled

Move POSIX compatibility related tickets out of R1 milestone (FutureHaiku/Features).

comment:2 by pulkomandy, 5 years ago

Resolution: → no change required
Status: new → closed

After discussion in ​https://review.haiku-os.org/c/haiku/+/883 , we have decided that this function is useless and it is better to not implement it at all.

For reference:

  • The implementation in glibc attempts to compute an hostid based on the local IP, but on Debian it computes it based on 127.0.0.1 instead so all machines have the same host id.
  • musl just returns 0
  • NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD implements it but mentions that is deprecated and that it had been removed in 4.4BSD

Alternative mechanisms (sysctl, file in /etc, dbus or systemd functions, ...) are available to identify the machine with a larger id (typically an UUID or similar).

I suggest we open a ticket against POSIX so that they remove it from the spec (apparently no one has bothered to do that yet).

Note: See TracTickets for help on using tickets.