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

[Clint Adams <clint@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2014 at 08:17:01AM -0800, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> I can imagine this logic got confused somewhere along the way, or that
> certain cases were missed.  I think Clint Adams still reads this list
> and it looks like --disable-dynamic-nss was his patch, so maybe he can
> speak to it more directly.

These days I tend not to unless my attention is called to something,
but here's what I remember.

The switch was intended for the zsh-static package in Debian, because
despite static compilation, (e)glibc uses dynamically-loaded NSS
modules.  These modules break ABI fairly often, and this makes less
useful a statically-compiled rescue shell.

I vaguely remember things being suboptimal and deciding that it would
be better to link zsh-static with dietlibc and avoid the problem
entirely, but this was blocked by the lack of a dietlibc-linked
ncurses.

I have no recollection of any of the implementation particularities.

These days static shells and utilities seem relatively unimportant,
especially when Debian has things like the grml-rescueboot package.