what's the purpose of MAXHOSTNAMELEN?

[Robert P. J. Day]

  in prepping for coalescing a lot of param.h files, i'm curious about
the purpose of this macro:

$ grep -rw MAXHOSTNAMELEN *
arch/s390/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/sparc/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/alpha/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/mn10300/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/arm/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN  64
arch/m32r/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/mips/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/m68k/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/xtensa/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/ia64/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/h8300/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/avr32/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64
arch/cris/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/um/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN  64      /* max length of hostname */
arch/powerpc/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/parisc/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
arch/frv/include/asm/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN		64	/* max length of hostname */
include/asm-generic/param.h:#define MAXHOSTNAMELEN	64	/* max length of hostname */
include/net/sctp/structs.h:#include <asm/param.h>		/* We get MAXHOSTNAMELEN.     */
$

  so lots of people define it but no one uses it.  it *is* exported to
user space in /usr/include/asm/param.h, but i still have no idea what
it's for in user space.  obsolete?

rday
--

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

            Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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