previously, transient failures like fd exhaustion or other
resource-related errors were treated the same as non-existence of
these files, leading to fallbacks or false-negative results. in
particular:
- failure to open hosts resulted in fallback to dns, possibly yielding
EAI_NONAME for a hostname that should be defined locally, or an
unwanted result from dns that the hosts file was intended to
replace.
- failure to open services resulted in EAI_SERVICE.
- failure to open resolv.conf resulted in querying localhost rather
than the configured nameservers.
now, only permanent errors trigger the fallback behaviors above; all
other errors are reportable to the caller as EAI_SYSTEM.
Rich Felker
2683e267fa