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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

DJ Delorie <dj@redhat.com> skribis:

> 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.

Yes.  In practice, I haven’t seen nscd protocol changes in 10 years of
Guix.

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

Yes, exactly.

Ludo’.