svn commit: r224674 - head/etc

[Peter Wemm]

On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 1:51 PM, Simon L. B. Nielsen <simon at nitro.dk> wrote:
>
> On 6 Aug 2011, at 11:16, Doug Barton wrote:
>
>> Author: dougb
>> Date: Sat Aug  6 09:16:53 2011
>> New Revision: 224674
>> URL: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/base/224674
>>
>> Log:
>>  Rather than edit the nsswitch.conf file based on ${MK_NIS} == "no"
>>  comment out the NIS _compat options by default, but leave them in
>>  the file for the convenience of users who want to enable it.
>>
>>  Update the comment in the file accordingly.
>
> This disables NIS by default which is rather surprising considering there has been no prior (which I have been able to find) discussion of this.
>
> At the _VERY_ least people need to be warned about this loudly. Unless you can show this really helps non-NIS users this is IMO a bad idea.

As much as I'd like to see NIS die a painful death, the answer to the
question of helping non-NIS users is "not much" as things stand.

The nis, files and dns components are statically compiled into libc.
There is no expensive dlopen("/usr/lib/nss_nis.so") to optimize out,
unlike some other systems.

The runtime overheads are negligible.  The compiled-in routines check
if nis activated with one syscall and immediately return NS_UNAVAIL if
nis is not configured.

As much as I hate NIS, I suspect this will break every single user of
NIS who happens to also use mergemaster -U.

-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com; KI6FJV
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5
"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete
themselves upon execution." -- Robert Sewell