Re: [PATCH 7/5] transport: optionally honor DNS SRV records

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Erik Faye-Lund wrote:

> It's an interesting feature, but I'm a little bit worried if this
> promotes non-portable setups; won't these repos be unreachable (at
> least without manually redirecting or also keeping a copy on the
> advertised URL) on machines where libresolv is unavailable? I'm mainly
> thinking about the "a single domain can use different hosts for
> different services"-benefit you mentioned.

Yes.  I think of redirecting with SRV records without a fallback as a
misconfiguration ("don't do that, then").  Note that it would not only
affect people without drand48 but people with broken DNS servers.

In the case of Alioth, what they do is let inetd listen on
git.debian.org = vasks.debian.org, using netcat to forward connections
to wagner.debian.org.  So clients with and without SRV support end up
finding their bits shuttled to the same place, with the only
difference being a little wasted load on vasks in the no-SRV case.

This means the Alioth admins don't get the benefit of not having to
set up a proxy, but they do get the benefit of clients taking on more
of the work and the service continuing to be available for some
clients if vasks goes down.

Maybe adding an envvar to disable the SRV handling would make it
easier for server admins to check the fallback.  Can we do more?

(By the way, what platforms don't support BIND and a random number
generator?)

Thanks,
Jonathan