A Micro release binding is asserted. The interface exported is Stable. Most UNIX systems, save Solaris, have had a TCP/IP utility function called 'inet_aton' for ages. This function is similar in purpose to the even older 'inet_addr' function, but repairs an obvious defect in the interface that latter function offers: there's no way to distinguish between the all-ones IPv4 broadcast address and just abject parsing failure. We've avoided adding this function as it didn't fit with our future direction for inet_pton and (later) getaddrinfo. Nevertheless, developers used it and continue to use it for new applications, and were then faced with unnecessary difficulties in porting to Solaris. As a result, many such applications either supply their own (often hackish) version of the function, or just don't compile on Solaris. This case establishes inet_aton as a Stable interface. As with its siblings, this will be exported by libnsl and documented along with the existing functions in inet(3SOCKET). For reference (as this is commonly defined by its behavior on 4.4BSD), the interface is: extern int inet_aton(const char *cp, struct in_addr *addr); Where: 'cp' points to an IPv4 address in one of the classic dotted-decimal forms (a.b.c.d, a.b.c, a.b, or a). 'addr' points to the result to be returned. The return value is 1 if conversion is successful, 0 otherwise. Internally, we currently define this symbol as a "private" interface in libresolv, because that library needs the function to operate correctly. In addition, some users "accidentally" discovered that linking with libresolv made the function available, and likely believe (despite the lack of documentation) that this is the right thing to do on Solaris. The actual implementation will do three things: - Move the existing inet_aton function out of libresolv and into libnsl, making it public in libnsl. - Make inet_aton a weak symbol with the strong _inet_aton used for internal ON libraries (to avoid accidental linkage with user-supplied hackish variants). - Verify that existing users who may have "discovered" the symbol in the wrong location will still see through to the new (and supported) libnsl version without having to relink.