dns and software, was Re: Reliable Cloud host ?

Fri Mar 2 14:51:57 UTC 2012

In a message written on Thu, Mar 01, 2012 at 05:02:30PM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
> Then push for better written abstraction libraries. There's no need to
> break the current functionality of the underlying system calls and
> libc functions which would be needed by any such library anyway.

Agree in part and disagree in part.

I think where the Open Source community has fallen behind in the
last decade is application level libraries.  Open source pioneered
cross platform libraries (libX11, libresolv, libm) in the early
days and the benefit was they worked darn near exactly the same on
all platforms.  It made programming and porting easier and lead to
growth in the ecosystem.

Today that mantle has been taken up by Apple and Microsoft.  In
Objective-C for example I can in one line of code say "retrieve
this URL", and the libraries know about DNS, IPv4 vrs IPv6, happy
eyeballs algorythms, multi-threading parts so that the user doesn't
wait, and so on.  Typical application programs on these platforms
never make any of the system calls that have been discussed in this
thread.

Unfortunately the open source world is without even basic enhancements.
Library work in many areas has stagnated, and in the areas where it is
progressing it's often done in a way to make the same library (by name)
perform differently on different operating systems!  Plenty of people
have done research finding rampent file copying and duplication of code,
and that's a bad sign:

http://tagide.com/blog/2011/09/file-cloning-in-open-source-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
http://www.solidsourceit.com/blog/?p=4
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~shanlu/paper/TSE-CPMiner.pdf

I can't find it now but there was a paper a few years back that looked
for a hash or CRC algorythm because they were easy to identify in source
by the fixed, unique constant they used.  In the Linux kernel alone was
like 10 implementations, widen to all software in the application
repository and there were like 10,000 instances of (nearly) the same
code!

Now, where I disagree.  Better libraries means not just better ones
at a high level (fetch me this URL), but better ones at a lower level.
For instance libresolv discussed here is old and creaky.  It was
designed for a different time.  Many folks doing DNS work have moved
on to libldns from Unbound because libresolv does not do what they 
need with respect to DNSSEC or IPv4/IPv6 issues.

I think the entire community needs to come together with a strong bit of
emphasis on libraries, standardizing them, making them ship with the
base OS so programmers can count on them, and rolling in new stuff that
needs to be in them on a timely basis.  Apple and Microsoft do it with
their (mostly closed) platforms, open source can do it better.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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