Comment by Beltalowda
3 years ago
The point was that if you're statically linking something that paths such as /etc/resolv.conf become "hard-coded", so that seems like an unimportant detail; something needs to check it, whether that's an application or an application through a library call: it's the same thing. /etc/nsswitch.conf is just kicking the can down the road from /etc/resolv.conf to /etc/nsswitch.conf.
What would exactly be that "something"?
Statically linking glibc was always strongly discouraged. Even if you did it, nss and iconv are always dynamically loaded, and they need symbols from glibc itself, so your statically-glibc-linked binary would need to load dynamic libc anyway!
No, something doesn't need to check it, today it exists only to serve broken applications (and systems broken by their admins). Its semantic doesn't allow to express the needs of resolvers today (like per-interface or per-zone resolving or other mechanisms, like mDNS).
How the resolver is configured is its internal issue; apps should just use getnameinfo().