For nsswitch, yes it should be a daemon. The current design maps in all sorts of unrelated (and potentially incompatible) junk into you process' address space.

For nsswitch, yes it should be a daemon. The current design maps in all sorts of unrelated (and potentially incompatible) junk into you process' address space. Far cleaner just to query over a socket. Doesn't need to be a system-wide daemon; it could just as easily be fired up on demand within a session (as in setsid) and shared between processes.