On the removal of nscd from Fedora, and the future of nscd.

[DJ Delorie]

Ludovic Courts <ludo@gnu.org> writes:
> Actually, by default, a Guix program on (say) Fedora-without-nscd won’t
> dlopen Fedora’s libnss_sssd.so.  Instead, it’ll search in vain for
> libnss_sssd.so in its search path (which does not include /usr/lib), and
> have its name lookups fail with EAI_SYSTEM, ENOENT, or some other
> unclear error.

Ah, that's different - mostly.  It still means you're using the host's
/etc/nsswitch.conf, but that just exposes a different problem - how to
handle site-wide services in isolated "programs" (flatpacks, containers,
chroots, statically linked apps, Guix).

NSCD certainly could act as that gateway, but I'd hate to rely on it
without an RFC defining the protocol, and such an RFC would enable it to
solve the problem in a wider context too.

Doing so, however, means that nscd (or some other equivalent) MUST be
present and running on all systems...