Hi all,
I'm using the homedir mail and I was doing some messing about with
eliminating /etc/passwd when I discovered that every time I log in, genpath
gets called 4 times, which means that getpwnam is called 4 times, which will
cause a big hit with a large passwd file (or if you use a DB). There are also
several other places in the code that do passwd file lookups.
It would be nice if qpopper did a single getpwnam call and then cached the
results somewhere (maybe in the in POP structure). I know genpath doesn't
have access to this structure (and it shouldn't either) but I think there
should be a way of passing an already retrieved passwd structure into
genpath.
A single passwd lookup opens the door for very easy addition of weird and
wacky custom passwd lookup methods. By the way, you still need to worry
about passwd lookups even if you're using PAM, Kerberos or APOP as these are
simply authentication methods and do not handle UID, GID or homedir lookup.
There's a bit of work involved in making this happen and I'm willing to do
it but only if the maintainers are open to accepting this sort of change.
So, maintainers, are you?
Fergal
