[PATCH] new applet gethostbyname

ralda at gmx.de ralda at gmx.de
Wed Jul 4 06:11:57 UTC 2012


Hi Paul!

> I'm not sure what you mean by emulated functions.

Busybox emulates the functionality of the standard getent functions for
passwd, shadow, group and gshadow files to bypass the usual need of
nsswitch and it's need of extra libraries. This behavior of Busybox may
be configured during build of Busybox binary.

This emulation may be a good thing on systems that do not provide the
get*ent functions or does otherwise not behave the same way.

> They all handle nsswitch.conf etc.

Not all libraries/systems have nsswitch functionality or honor
nsswitch.conf.

> Perhaps there's something about the Busybox environment which makes
> this less than ideal?

The problem is the extra need for nsswitch libraries. Think of
statically linking with a single binary and no extra libraries. In this
case bypassing the nsswitch (not using get*ent functions) is a good
thing and helps to minimize space requirement.

On a standard glibc based system I use nsswitch functionality and there
is no emulation of the mentioned functions.

--
Harald


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