Re: NIS and /etc/passwd

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 01:51:40PM +1030, Brett Lymn wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 10:33:22PM +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> > 
> > NSS can express at least the part of "look into passwd and continue if
> > no match was found". It would be easy to have a NIS config file to
> > express "look for / accept the following users/groups/patterns". As
> > such, I don't see the need for keeping it in /etc/passwd. In fact,
> > having such a filter functionality would likely be useful for a number
> > of data sources. It could certainly make the code much clearer by
> > prodiving composition of independent modules.
> > 
> 
> But what it cannot do is "this user account is in NIS, use all the
> details but override the users home directory or shell", this can be a
> very useful thing to do sometimes.

This sounds like an even worse layering violation :) But again, I see no
reason why it should be in the NIS layer nor do I see incomplete records
belong into /etc/passwd. This brings me back to the question of what
functionality is required and how can it be obtained in a clean way. If
it is very useful, it would be desirable i.e. for nss_ldap as well.

Joerg