Help wanted: Linking to libbind9 on Ubuntu Linux

[Tony Finch]

Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg at tristatelogic.com> wrote:
>
> Second, I wish I undrstood your comment that the the files that appear
> on my Ubuntu system and whose names begin with "libbind9" are "unrelated"
> to the "real thing" (ISC) library of the same name.

There are a couple of events that make this confusing (the BIND4 -> BIND8
-> BIND9 transitions). Here's my understanding of the history - I'm
probably wrong about the details but I think it's roughly the right shape.

Back in the 4.3BSD days, there was a fairly close integration between BSD
Unix and the classic Unix Internet daemons - sendmail, bind, syslog, rsh,
inetd, etc. usw. and this got copied into many Internet software stacks
because of the liberal license of the net/1 BSD release.

So the classic libc resolver API is basically the BIND4 libbind, and the
resolvers in glibc and the BSDs still descend from this codebase.

BIND8 was a significant revision of the BIND code (e.g. the improved
configuration syntax, support for DNS extensions) but I get the impression
the library structure was not so different from BIND4.

(Aside: why did 8 come after 4? The SCCS revision IDs in the BSD source
repo were 4.x for 4.0BSD, 5.x for 4.1BSD ... 8.x for 4.4BSD, and 4.4BSD
was around the time when projects like BIND and Sendmail spun out, so they
took the 8.x version number with them.)

BIND9 was a new codebase with very different internal library APIs, and an
ambition to completely revamp the libc -> resolver interface - this is
what the lwresd stuff was about. But no unix adopted this new design into
its libc, so the ambition withered.

So the name remained the same but the codebases are very different.
(I could be very cheeky and compare
perl4 / perl5 / perl6 :: bind4 / bind9 / bind10)

Tony.
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