> I was reading the getpwent(3) man page and there, at the very bottom
> of the page...
> in the middle of the very bottom of the page...
> away from everything ELSE at the very bottom of the page...

Heh.  Alice, perchance?

> ...read the following words:

> COMPATIBILITY
>      The historic function setpwfile(3),  which allowed the specification of
>      alternate password databases, has been deprecated and is no longer avail-
>      able.

(Actually, setpwfile allowed specification of _alternative_ databases.
Perhaps I should send-pr this.)

> I'm curious as to why setpwfile() was deprecated.

Probably about the same time networked passwd databases came in.  Sun
did the same thing.

In both cases (NetBSD and Sun) I think it's stupid.  It's just too
useful to be able to work on alternative databases, and deprecating it
really doesn't buy anything.  (All I can see is the dubious benefit of
being able to throw away the plain-passwd-file parsing code, and that
only in our case - Sun still has it around, though we use db files.)

Yeah, you lose network databases if you setpwfile().  What's wrong with
that?  Anyone calling setpwfile() presumably doesn't care about where
the system gets its live passwd data from.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu
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