Comment 4 for bug 246322

The main reason to be extra careful with this sort of setup is that messing up NIS can prevent users logging in to their system which is obviously an extremely serious issue for upgrades since it could render the system non-functional. This means that we need to be very conservative about changes which risk causing such breakage.

Other distributions have very different models for how NIS and other authentication methods are configured so it's difficult to directly compare.