[Dnsmasq-discuss] Polling of hosts file

[Simon Kelley]

On 19/03/14 04:04, Franco Broi wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Just wondering why dnsmasq doesn't poll the hosts file for changes like
> it does for resolv.conf?
> 

Polling files is dangerous. You can get race conditions where the update
time changes but the file is still in the process of being written.
Polling resolv.conf is necessary because there are lots of things which
just write it and expect the changes to be picked up (because that's
what the resolver library does.) That's not true for /etc/hosts, so it's
better to mandate the update-then-signal model.


Cheers,

Simon.