That’s one reason. Another is NSS: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Name-Service-Switch.html http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_nod

That’s one reason. Another is NSS: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Name-Service-Switch.html http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Name-Servi... It’s a mechanism in glibc for loading dynamic libraries at runtime (based on a config file) to handle DNS and some other things. Anything statically linked can’t support this, which can cause issues with some setups.