endianess of /etc/pwd.db

[Jeroen C. van Gelderen]

On Wednesday, Apr 9, 2003, at 14:26 Europe/Amsterdam, Jacques A. 
Vidrine wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 10:17:41AM +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>>
>> Kris ran into this problem:  copying a /etc/pwd.db from one endianess
>> to another gave him really weird uid/gid numbers.
>>
>> The DB code itself is endianess-agnostic, so the first warning one
>> gets is the weird UID/GID.
>>
>> Should we make the endianess of this file explicit to prevent this
>> pit-fall for our users ?  The cost would be less than epsilon.
>
> I am working in this area recently, and the exact same thought
> occurred to me.  I think we should do it.  I would add a file format
> version flag, the absence of which indicates the current MD format,
> and adjust getpwent/pwd_mkdb accordingly.  Are there any other tools
> that would need to be touched?

Anybody know how NetBSD handles this?

-J
-- 
Jeroen C. van Gelderen - jeroen at vangelderen.org

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague
brings. The earthquake means good business for construction workers,
and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists, and
undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate
earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in
the general interest. -- Ludwig von Mises