Comment by ianburrell
3 days ago
There are resolvers for not just DNS but for users and other lookups. The list of resolvers is dynamic, they are configured in /etc/nsswitch.conf. The /etc/hosts lookup is part of the system.
Where do the resolvers come from? It needs to be possible to install resolvers separately and dynamically load them. Unless you want to have NIS always installed. Better to install LDAP for those who need it.
It could be handled by a system daemon instead. We don't really need this in-process all the time.