Re: LYNX-DEV Making lynx more portable and reliable

[John E. Davis]

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.

--John
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