[getdns-api] timeouts specified as milliseconds rather than seconds

[Melinda Shore]

On 11/07/2013 12:12 PM, Matt Miller wrote:
> I think millisecond precision is actually burdensome to API users in
> the wild.

I think it really depends on who those API users actually are.  There
are some tradeoffs here and I think it's valuable to consider several
things.  I think there's pretty clearly value to some kinds of
applications in having subsecond granularity.  For example, in VoIP
address resolution is one of a number of things that contribute to
delay between the time the user has finished dialing (or whatever) and
the time that the phone starts ringing.  There are other situations
in which there's either delay sensitivity or user experience
issues.

Now, I'd agree that millisecond resolution is almost certainly
unnecessarily precise, but it's something that Unix/POSIX developers
are used to working with and it seems reasonable to me that if there's
interest in subsecond resolution, timeval is a reasonable encoding.
But ultimately it's about the tradeoffs, and if there's an expectation
that applications using getdns will simply not need that kind of
granularity, then it's probably not worth the effort.

Melinda