bug#1224: [PATCH] user/group name completion

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>
> Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:17:25 -0400
> Cc: 1224@emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com
> 
> The other part of your patch, adding functions to the C code that call
> getpwent and getgrent, may be useful.  But I don't see the advantage
> over parsing /etc/passwd or /etc/group manually (or calling a shell
> command that does it).

The advantage is that getpwent and getgrent are more portable, of
course.

Only Posix systems can be trusted to actually have /etc/passwd and
/etc/groups.  On systems where these files are absent, we can still
have the C APIs (or craft our owns inside Emacs, as w32.c does).

That is not to say we should necessarily add these APIs, if they
currently don't have any callers within Emacs.