Comment by creshal
12 days ago
Ohh, this looks nice. I've been wondering for a while why nobody had yet come up with a non-insane alternative to nss (whatever systemd cooked up need not apply), since the fundamental problem is fairly easy, if you're not in the position of the original NSS authors (i.e., "we just invented dynamic library loading and can't come up with a better example usecase").
> whatever systemd cooked up need not apply
systemd uses nss like everything else.
> since the fundamental problem is fairly easy
Very insightful. The problem is actually pretty complicated and requires runtime initialization, unless you forego all of the services NSS provides.
> systemd uses nss like everything else.
systemd has an nss alternative: https://systemd.io/USER_GROUP_API/
Systemd is accessible via NSS https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/nss-...
It's only an alternative if you connect to it directly (and why would you?). It's more an alternative to writing another nsswitch backend.
NSS is overcomplicated for 90% of use cases, and as another poster pointed out, that didn't stop systemd from trying to make it worse.