assistance patching glibc for getprotobyname

[Farid Zakaria]

Hello,

I'm trying to investigate a patch to glibc for the purpose of
http://nixos.org/ similar to what they have already accomplished for
the locales [1]

The goal is to patch glibc for _getprotobyname_ so that if an
environment variable is set, it will treat the environment variable
path as the database file.

The goal here for nixpkgs, is to have packages which are hermetic and
sealed -- depend on no external dependency. The issue at the moment is
that /etc/protocols must exist on the system which breaks the closure.

I've been trying to dig into the nss/ folder & codebase, but it's
heavy use of macros makes it difficult for me to determine some of the
scalpel cuts I need to perform.

I was hoping someone could point me at some breadcrumbs to start my edits.

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/development/libraries/glibc/nix-locale-archive.patch

Thank you.
Farid Zakaria