Net::Ping croaks on DNS no-record

[michael-dev]

I've been using Net::Ping 2.43 with the following code:

my $p = Net::Ping->new();
my $r = $p->ping($host);
if ($r) { ... } else { ... }

Though, $host sometimes contains a non-resolvable hostname. With Net::Ping 2.43, this resulted in the else branch being taking. Now the application exists, which is not what I need. Additionally, this is not documented - crashing the application if a dns name does not resolve.

This therefore should be disableable.

[michael-dev]

error output_
getaddrinfo($host,,AF_INET) failed - Name or service not known at ... line ...

[rurban]

Are you sure you want a different error result object, when
ping fails? IMHO it's much more natural to return undef.

[michael-dev]

The problem is not ping returning undef, I'm fine with this. The problem is ping doing croak, which terminates the perl interpreter and thus the application dies instead continuing to the if/else statement.

[rurban]

Oh, that's a big problem, agreed

[rurban]

I've added a new test for this problem.
ping does not croak on a wrong hostname, it just warns if the name cannot be resolved, but still returns undef. It only croaks on more severe problems, like wrong family, invalid params and such.

The warning is fair, since ping expects a IP and checks a route to the host. If the error is elsewhere, like in the resolver, this error is unexpected and thus warns. We cannot just silently ignore a resolver failure. We should only silently return undef when the route is off, but not when the DNS is off.

Can you check again where it croaks?