On Apr 16,  6:01am, Todd Vierling wrote:
} 
} Perhaps the question should be rephrased as, "do we *need* the ability for
} init to have external auth methods, and so forth?"  If not, then init can
} stay static without pain.

     In order to answer that question, you need to ask when and why
does init need to be able to authenticate people.  The answer is that
it asks for the root password when entering single user mode on an
insecure console.  This is usually done immediately after boot.  At
this point in time, there is normally no networking (with the possible
exception of diskless boots), and there are no other processes
running.  This means that you can't access distributed password
databases on other systems and there won't be any server processes for
local NIS/NIS+/LDAP/Hesiod/etc. databases.  In other words,
realistically, at the point in time when init wants to do
authentication, the only method available will be local file.

     Does init need support for multi-byte locales?  This seems to be
the other big reason for dynamic linking.

}-- End of excerpt from Todd Vierling