>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?

itojun