Am I way off base here?

[Richard Coleman]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
    Is there something fundamentally difficult about implementing
    things like getpwnam() through an IPC mechanism + maintainng a local
    cache that I am missing?  Because I am really getting angry at the
    FreeBSD-5 folk acting so goddamn high and mighty about their NSS DLL
    requiring a dynamic root crap.
    Sorry, just venting.  But, damn it, it's annoying.  What the hell do they
    think they are accomplishing other then obfuscating the system even more
    then it already is?  I mean, we've had the concept of NIS for a long time.
    It's obvious that IPC is the only way to go for this stuff even though
    NIS never implemented it right.  What am I missing here?
						-Matt
I can't think of anything that would prevent an IPC based mechanism for 
NSS/PAM from working correctly.  I'm sure it can be done.  My chief 
concern is that there is already lots of code already written for 
PAM/NSS that use the dynamic approach, since that is how it is 
implemented on Solaris, Linux, and now FreeBSD-current.  If a totally 
different approach is taken on DragonFly, it may be difficult to port 
these third party modules.

Richard Coleman
Richard.Coleman at xxxxxxxxxx