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Re: glibc 2.8 release on gnu.org?
On 6 Sep 2008, Brett Neumeier outgrape:
> On the subject of creating release tarballs, I have a follow-up
> question that I hope someone can answer: up through glibc release 2.7,
> there was a "glibc-libidn" add-on as well as the glibc-ports add-on.
> Is libidn still a valid add-on? If so, where might I find source for
> it? There aren't any references to it that I can find on the glibc
> wiki or in the FAQ.
The 2.8 tag in CVS has it (but it's had only one tiny cosmetic change in
two years).
> (As far as that goes, it's not clear to me what libidn is for in the
> first place. If someone could point me toward relevant information, I
> could put something about it on the wiki.)
It allows you to look up internationalized domain names (containing
characters outside the usual 7-bit ASCII range): these are encoded using
longer strings of 7-bit ASCII called `punycode', so something has to do
the transcoding. That's what libidn is for.
The glibc add-on uses this to allow you to look up such domain names
with the usual C library domain name resolution calls: without that,
only applications with special support for internationalized domaina
names, that link to libidn explicitly, can do it.