Re: Effectiveness of --disable-dynamic-nss?

[Peter Stephenson <p.stephenson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 06 Nov 2014 15:11:59 +0100
Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Someone was mentioning on the #zsh channel that $USERNAME was empty
> when they compiled statically and I vaguely remembered glibc doesn't
> support name lookup statically, which led me to look at
> --disable-dynamic-nss. I noticed it seems to define USE_* stuff when
> the switch is not given for some HAVE_* stuff that pertains to name
> lookup. However, even in the commit where it was introduced, it
> skipped many HAVE_GETPWNAM (for example), and converted others, some
> even within the diff context of other defines that were changed. So my
> two questions are:
> 
> Is there a reason they were left alone or does the switch not work?
> If they're all meant to be disabled, why not just have it #undef the
> HAVE_* defines instead of defining new things and changing every user,
> and hope nobody ever introduces new HAVE_* #ifdefs?
> 
> And tangentially, is $USERNAME supposed to return anything when
> compiled with this switch given? The function that handles this
> parameter was switched to USE_INITGROUPS but still uses HAVE_GETPWNAM,
> which is confusing to me.

I haven't looked at the history, but from your report this looks like a
case of fairly severe code rot combined with a partial implementation.
I don't think anybody round here is likely to have verified that option
even for basic operation for quite a while.

pws