[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#892854: Hostname resolution getting stuck for many seconds

[Simon McVittie]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2018 at 20:01:07 +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> I cannot remember having touched [nsswitch.conf] on this system. And I
> guess that if you have a record of all versions installed in the past
> then it should be easy to detect a pristine copy of that file and
> update/replace it as needed.

Unfortunately, no, we can't. Each line of nsswitch.conf is collaboratively
maintained by glibc and every relevant nsswitch plugin (libnss-*)
by editing it in-place. So the expected contents of the hosts line
depend which other nsswitch hosts plugins you have, and there is no
single history.

In a more opinionated distribution, the distro's core maintainers might
maintain a single nsswitch.conf containing all the supported plugins in
some reasonable order; but this is Debian, where all configurations are
considered valid, even the ones that make little sense.

> Still, I think this problem deserves a better solution. Because it's not
> really obvious for the user what is going on in case of such trouble.

I'm open to suggestions for how we can improve things for pre-2013
installations, within the constraints that I can't change the past,
and I don't want to violate Policy by overriding sysadmin configuration.

Post-2013 installations should be OK already (the purge/reinstall cycle
that I suggested gives you the equivalent of a post-2013 installation).

    smcv