[gentoo-dev] New Linux-PAM stabling plans

[Ned Ludd]

Forwarded by request of somebody thats smart/lucky enough to not 
be on this list but still monitoring it.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò <flameeyes@g.o>
Subject: New Linux-PAM stabling plans
Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2007 20:51:36 +0200

Hi everybody; sorry to mail here rather than -dev, but I'm not
subscribed to it and I have no intention to subscribe in the next
future. Please forward a copy of this message to gentoo-dev if you can
and want, thanks.

Since while I was gone nobody took care of PAM, I had to resume work on
it (sigh), and almost at the same time I got reported that PAM 0.78
doesn't allow to set some limits in limits.conf to "unlimited" value.
This is a good enough reason to work actively on marking 0.99 stable.

Unfortunately, 0.99 upgrade isn't entirely trivial, as pam_stack.so is
gone, pam_userdb is moved and so is pam_console, plus a few more
modules are no more present at all.

To solve this issue, I just wrote an upgrade guide in the PAM project
that will appear soon at [1]. That guide should contain all the
information needed to pass through the upgrade easily.

I also have an ebuild ready to commit that will make a lot of warnings
and various noise when the pam.d file in the system still refers to the
removed packages, pointing to the upgrade guide. It also dies if the
user still has pam_stack or other modules that are not moved but really
not available. (I'm still not sure where I should die: pkg_setup would
stop users from building pkgs, pkg_preinst would waste people time if
they didn't notice the warnings at setup stage, as right now the
warnings are printed in both, and preinst dies).

I'd really like comments on the guide (that still has to pass through
an editor -- Josh would you mind? :) -- so please skip grammar check
for now ;) ), so that I can address whatever is needed.

Now, I could ask stabilization even right now, but, I'm not sure how to
convey enough focus on what is going to happen. I'll write about this
on Planet for sure, but then? Is GLEP42 ready? Should I ask PR people
to publish this?

Anyway, I'll at least give it a week or two for more testing and for
proofreading the guide; developers are invited to try the upgrade on
their (non-production first) machines, and report immediately any
problem with the procedure.

Sorry for the delay to get a decent PAM working, thanks for waiting.

[1] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/pam/upgrade-0.99.xml

Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/

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