[Bug: 21.5-b27] open-network-stream-internal hangs if xemacs started before network brought up

[Jan Rychter]

Andre Srinivasan:

> If I start xemacs before I bring up my network interface,
> open-network-stream-internal hangs on name resolution even though the
> network interface has subsequently been up.  If I pass o-n-s-i an IP
> address rather than a name, it returns correctly.
> 
> I have verified that this is not a 21.5 regression as it occurs in
> 21.4.19 as well.

I can confirm I've been seeing this for the past several years at
least. It is on my private list of Top 5 XEmacs Annoying Issues.

As for me, this means that before I start XEmacs, I have to make sure
that /etc/resolv.conf contains nameservers accessible from anywhere on
the net. Once I start XEmacs, only those nameservers will *ever* be
used to do lookups. This means that if I mistakenly start XEmacs with,
say, 192.168.1.254 in my /etc/resolv.conf, it won't work once I switch
networks. Very, very annoying. 

I reported this back in 2003, see
http://list-archive.xemacs.org/xemacs-beta/200311/msg00269.html. This is
not distribution-related, as I've switched distributions a number of
times since. XEmacs is the only application I know that does that
(Firefox for example works just fine).

--J.