More descriptive error message when reading /etc/hosts file

[hurufu]

Hello, thanks for writing and maintaining s6 suite of tools.

I had quite a head-scratcher recently, because it was hard to deduce why s6-tcpclient failed with error:

s6-tcpclient: fatal: unable to init DNS: Invalid or incomplete multi-byte or wide character

I had to resort to reading sources... The problem was that I had some strange entries in /etc/hosts file:

fe80::1%lo0 localhost
0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0

Is it possible to extend error messages to inform that at least it was an error related to /etc/hosts file parsing? Or maybe ignore erroneous lines, because this file is commonly managed manually, so it is possible that it will contain some errors in it.

[skarnet]

Yeah, that problem was also reported to me from another source. The problem is twofold:

• indeed /etc/hosts parsing should warn on unrecognized entries and go to the next line instead of failing altogether. I'll work on this for the next version of s6-dns.
• Also, s6-tcpclient should not unconditionally load /etc/hosts, I'll add an option to do that on demand. I'll add this to the next version of s6-networking.

Sorry I don't have a quick fix, apart from commenting the entries with expanded syntax in /etc/hosts.

[hurufu]

I don't need a quick fix, if it will be available in the next release – that's good enough.