Todd C. Miller <millert@openbsd.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Jan 2024 09:34:04 +0000, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> 
> > I'd prefer that. The db files might have mattered 25 years ago on a busy
> > system but they seem to be an anachronism now.
> >
> > But if we don't do that, then I'm ok with jmc's manpage diff.
> 
> There is no specific support for db files in login.conf, it just
> use cgetent(3) and friends which support .db files as well as plain
> text files.

I think it is silly to make a db for this.  You need the non-db parser in
libc anyways.  I doubt it is much faster. 

> The only file using cgetent(3) that really benefits from having a
> .db version is termcap(5), due to its large size.  However, we
> don't really use termcap.db anyway since the terminfo(5) files are
> more capable.

Yep.

> So, do we want to drop support for .db files using cgetent(3)
> entirely?  That seems a bit radical to me but it may be that there
> is no real use case for it on a modern system.

Quite likely.

The libc change should be prototyped to see what it looks like.