Since libnss_wins.so is meant to be dynamically loaded into many other programs,
it should avoid using function names that may collide with names that other
programs might want to use.

For example, having wins as a hostname resolution method in my
/etc/nsswitch.conf caused my elinks web browser to crash.  (See the attached URL
for details.)  In short, elinks contains a function called convert_string(),
which causes libnss_wins.so to segfault because libnss_wins.so calls elinks's
convert_string() instead of its own.

There are many many potential land-mine symbols like that in libnss_wins.so,
such as add_suffix, align_string, allow_access, become_daemon, close_sock,
file_save, etc.  Any of them could cause unpredictable breakage in any program
that performs hostname lookups!

Contrast this with most of my other libnss_* libraries on my system, which don't
define many symbols, and those that are defined have nice long names that are
unlikely to clash with anything.

It might be a rather large undertaking to properly clean up the namespace of
libnss_wins.so, but it is possible to easily mitigate its effects by linking the
shared library with a -Bsymbolic flag.  Using -Bsymbolic changes the runtime
symbol lookup order to first look in libnss_wins.so itself before looking
elsewhere.  I believe that that is the desired behavior, and should be used on
all platforms that support it.  By linking libnss_wins.so with -Bsymbolic, I was
able to run elinks without errors despite the clash of the convert_string()
function name.