Possible account information APIs? (lookupd etc)

[William Jon McCann]

Hi,

For some aspects of fast-user-switching and face browsing it would be
useful to be able to:

1. Query / store user photos (avatars)
2. Query user account status in an implementation/backend independent
way (locked, expired etc)
3. Query the user's real world name etc (ie. not just gecos)
4. Receive user added / removed notifications
5. Receive user property changed notifications (picture / real name /
etc changed)
6. etc

As far as I can tell these things are either very difficult to do
cleanly with traditional Posix APIs and in-band with NSS modules or
not possible at all.  Though I'd love to be proven wrong.

I ran across something that looks somewhat interesting.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/lookupd.8.html
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30770
http://aplawrence.com/MacOSX/macosxlookupd.html

Darwin seems (at least from these docs) to use lookupd for some of this.

Anyone have any experience with lookupd specifically?  Or pointers to
different solutions?

Thanks,
Jon