Hi,
This patch addresses the bug introduced in commit 803e2a28. The problem it fixes is that after the init_by_options function completes, if the options object has an empty sortlist (nsort == 0), the destination channel's nsort value will still remain -1. The implication is that if 'sortlist' is not present in /etc/resolv.conf, then ares_dup function is pretty useless in that it always entails a costly read of /etc/resolv.conf.
As a side note, the current documentation for the ares_dup function is a bit misleading in its use of the nonexistent ares_dup_options function.
Alexander Drachevskiy