[Scratchbox-users] bootstrapping issue using sbrsh

[Timo Savola]

On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 13:41 -0700, K. Richard Pixley wrote:

> I've run into a bootstrapping issue when using sbrsh and I was wondering 
> how other people had dealt with it.
> 
> As I'm building my system, (from scratch), one of the things I need to 
> do is create a /etc/passwd for my target.  As soon as I do that, I've 
> trashed whichever /etc/passwd was there previously.  Since sbrsh relies 
> on the previous version, (the one with my uid listed), installing the 
> new /etc/passwd breaks the sbrsh mechanism.
> 
> So I'm wondering, how have other folks worked around this particular issue?

sbrsh (version 6 and higher) itself doesn't require anything from
your /etc/passwd, but you need to have an user account there for things
to work nicely on the target system in general.  I don't think there is
any other easy way than to keep the user account there temporarily.
After all, we would need at least a patched libc and/or a custom nss
module along with a custom nsswitch.conf on the target to work around
that, and it would be even worse.

timo