chroot's userspec option

[Ken Werner]

Hi,

I noticed when using chroot's --userspec option the Gnulib's 
parse_user_spec function gets called that leads the glibc to dlopen 
libnss_compat.so.2 (probably getpwnam() that triggers the libc's NSS 
mechanism). Since parse_user_spec is called after the chroot system call 
the new root directory will be searched. I guess this means that the 
chroot utility attempts to parse the user spec in the "guest" 
environment. Is this behavior intended? In my case the chroot 
environment contains a libnss_compat.so.2 that's not compatible and the 
chroot utility fails with:

/usr/bin/chroot: relocation error: /lib/libnss_compat.so.2: symbol 
_nss_files_parse_pwent, version GLIBC_2.0 not defined in file libc.so.6 
with link time reference

As soon as I LD_PRELOAD libnss_compat.so.2 the "host" environment is 
used to parse the user spec. If this is the intended behavior it would 
be better if chroot calls the parse_user_spec prior issuing the chroot 
syscall. Any thoughts? :)

Regards,
Ken