DNS JNDI provider

Fri Feb 15 06:02:00 GMT 2002

Pete Chown writes:
 > I've made a fair amount of progress on this and I should have
 > something that you can have a look at soon. I have a couple of
 > questions, though, about code which is going into gcc:
 > 
 > 1. Sun's implementation of this provider uses a class which is under
 > the com.sun hierarchy. For example Sun's documentation talks
 > about the java.naming.factory.initial property as follows:
 > 
 > > This property is used to select the DNS service provider as the
 > > initial context. It is not used by the provider itself. It
 > > specifies the class name of the initial context factory for the
 > > provider, and may be set as in the following example:
 > >
 > > env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,
 > > "com.sun.jndi.dns.DnsContextFactory");
 > 
 > I find this rather odd because I thought the idea was that com.sun
 > packages were "private" rather than being part of the published
 > Java API. At present there are no com.sun packages in gcj CVS
 > (unless I'm looking in the wrong place). This would seem to fit
 > with the idea that com.sun packages are private.
 > 
 > The problem this creates is that to make my JNDI provider a
 > drop-in replacement for Sun's I would need to put it under
 > com.sun. This seems like a bad idea for trademark reasons if
 > nothing else.
Interesting. It's very hard to know what to suggest in this case.
Perhaps all we should do is produce a special error message from the
compiler.
 > 2. I've had a look at some of the documentation about submitting
 > patches to gcc, and they indicate that I should provide test
 > cases. Of course this is a good thing. However, what test cases
 > would you like to see for a DNS component? At the moment I have a
 > test zone which I install. It is not published on the Internet;
 > rather it is just installed as "test." in the local named.conf.
 > 
 > People are going to get annoyed, I imagine, if they run the gcc
 > tests and get failures because they don't have this zone
 > installed. I could publish the zone on the Internet but then
 > people might get failures because they are building gcc on a
 > machine that isn't Internet connected.
Then they get test failures because they haven't provided all of the
test infrastructure. I find it hard to see why that's a problem.
Is there any reason why you can't use the root name servers for
testing? Perhaps they don't allow all of the requests that you need?
Andrew.