On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 10:07:49AM +0900, itojun@iijlab.net wrote:
  | >Yes, making nsswitch's dispatch routines thread safe (and also
  | >supporting dynamically linked back-ends) has been a goal of mine for
  | >a while.  Of course, it's much easier to do this now we have threads
  | >in the base system (and dynamically linked world for the second goal).
  | 
  | 	the issue is not just nsswitch()-based routines, but also
  | 	*hostent, *protoent, *servent code's thread safety, in both NIS-case
  | 	and /etc/foo case.  do you think it realistic to think that we have
  | 	enough manpower for those work?  why don't we switch to irs-based
  | 	library, with tweaks to make it compatible with /etc/nsswitch.conf?

All that we need to change is the back-end for "dns" lookups for
those services (e.g, _dns_gethtbyname() et al).  That gives you
the resolver upgrade to "BIND 8" DNS lookups that you want want,
without all the other baggage that IRS comes with.  There's no
point in bringing in the entire IRS framework (to support switching
between dns, nis, and files) when our nsswitch framework already
supports such switching.

Luke.