Unfortunate dynamic linking for everything

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 15:38:49 -0800, Tim Kientzle <kientzle at acm.org> said:


> There have been a lot of proposed solutions:

>   * Rewrite NSS to not require dlopen().
>   * Rewrite dlopen() to not require dynamic linking.
>   * Don't support NSS in /bin/sh.
>   * Change the default script interpreter for rc and such.
>   * Make dynamic linking faster.

You forgot:

	* Allow statically-linked programs to use dynamic NSS modules
	  by forking a (dynamically-linked) resolver process when
	  needed.

This leads to a related, but widely disparaged option:

	* Have a persistent NSS caching daemon with an RPC interface
	  that all programs can access for NSS lookups.  You might
	  call such a program `nscd'.  (Might as well be honest about
	  it.)

Both of these options may incidentally help to resolve threading
issues in the C library (although that would not be the preferred way
of doing so).

-GAWollman