Issue #743 has been updated by Brian Candler.
But:
$ ruby19 -rsocket -e 'p Socket.gethostbyname("localhost")'
["localhost", [], 2, "\x7F\x00\x00\x01"]
(ditto 1.8.6)
If Ruby has been changed so that it doesn't do a reverse DNS lookup when given an IP address to gethostbyname, then I support this change.
(1) It causes all sorts of problems and delays where reverse DNS isn't set up properly, e.g. with druby://x.x.x.x/ where x.x.x.x is an IP address.
I have on many occasions had to do
Socket.do_not_reverse_lookup = true
just to allow this to work properly.
(2) I found this annoying because I never asked for a reverse DNS lookup, and yet one was forced on me.
(3) I found this surprising, because the stdlib gethostbyname() doesn't do a reverse lookup.
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http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/743
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http://redmine.ruby-lang.org