IDNA and getnameinfo() and getaddrinfo()

Nicolas Williams Nicolas.Williams at oracle.com
Tue Jun 15 20:29:15 CEST 2010


On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 06:18:07PM +0000, Shawn Steele wrote:
> > I think Simon's playing it safe, and perhaps a conservative approach
> > that results in A-labels by default in UIs is better.
> 
> Depends, perhaps, on your perspective.  I think international users
> would be happiest if the Unicode forms worked by default.  It makes
> sense if some app didn't want that behavior, but adding a flag means
> everyone has to recompile.  Hopefully (perhaps naively), some apps
> might work without that step if it handled IDN by default.  My
> personal preference anyway.

I don't have enough experience here, but intuitively I believe that
defaults which result in less A-label UI leakage should be better (as
long as we don't then end up with U-label leakage into IDN-unaware
domainname slots -- that's the risk).

Since Simon's extensions ahve shipped, we cannot reverse their sense.
Therefore I propose that we add a pair of flags with the reverse sense,
and then allow the default behavior to be implementation-specific and/or
locally configurable.  Then we'll be able to see what, if anything,
breaks by having getnameinfo() return U-labels by default and
getnameinfo() supporting unprepared inputs.

Nico
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