Luke Mewburn writes:
> 
[..]
> 	As I've mentioned a few times; if we
> 		a) ship an working nsswitch.conf in /usr/src/etc that
> 		   maintains the behaviour that most people want
> 		b) prompt the user at install time incase they wish to
> 		   override this
> 		b) document in the INSTALL notes the the need to have
> 		   /etc/nsswitch.conf with `hosts:  .. dns ...' to get
> 		   DNS lookups
> 	then what's the problem? If upgrading user's don't read
> 	INSTALL notes, don't do a diff of etc.tar.gz, and things
> 	don't work then what more can we do to support people
> 	such as them?

Would it be too much of a "hack" to put this in /etc/netstart?  
Something like this block:
if [ ! -f /etc/nsswitch.conf -a -f /etc/resolv.conf ]; then
	echo "Warning: creating default /etc/nsswitch.conf!"
	echo "hosts: files dns" > /etc/nsswitch.conf
	sleep 5
fi

This would require an updated /etc/netstart at a minimum, but might
eliminate some of the confusion.  Also, the "default" could be easily
changed to "hosts: dns files" if it was decided that way.  This check
could always be eliminated later, without affecting libc.

-Andrew