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GNU may have a political opposition to static linking, but there are major practical issues too. For features like nsswitch, the libc has to dlopen shared libra
by mort96 4y ago
GNU may have a political opposition to static linking, but there are major practical issues too. For features like nsswitch, the libc has to dlopen shared libraries, which themselves link against libc. Static linking means you'll end up with (at least) 2 different libc versions in the address space at the same time, operating on the same data structures. GNU (and some other libc implementors) try to make that work as well as possible, but it's necessarily an unholy mess.
- zoobab 4y ago28 years of using linux, never used nsswitch.conf. I learned about it's existence when a colleague of mine asked a question about it during an recruiting interview of a candidate.
- jackweirdy 4y agoI feel like someone has opened a jet engine and showed me there’s a hamster wheel in there; I had no idea this even existed
- InvaderFizz 4y agoJust a matter of where and how you worked. I would expect anyone doing sysadmin work on Linux in any sort of centrally managed network would have exposure to it. It is certainly relevant any time you are messing with NIS/LDAP configs and troubleshooting. Your typical developer, even doing C app development I wouldn't expect to have interacted with nsswitch unless their local name resolution was broken somehow and they were trying to fix their own problems.
- anthk 4y agoI tought LDAP/YP already configured that upon proper configuration.
- pxc 4y agoCame up in my first few years of using Linux, as a kid, at home, to get NetBIOS and Avahi name resolution working so my device could access Windows network shares and other things by name. No fancy enterprise use case required; just being able to ping a computer on the LAN by name involves nsswitch.conf!
- Ferret7446 4y agoShouldn't dbus solve this issue?
- mort96 4y agoNot until someone does the work of transitioning all uses of dlopen in glibc to dbus communication with a service. I don't think that's currently a plan, and building a dbus client into glibc doesn't seem very plausible.