On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Andrew Morgan wrote: > There are a long list of things that seem to be common. I have no issue > with pursuing such a common function library. Thanks for a favourable response to this idea. > My only concern is that we don't cross the line of adding new > communication channels between modules and applications. The > pluggability of the current library will break if we do the wrong thing > there. Ideally, it would be nice if a module developer could write a > module using the proposed library that would be useable on a Solaris PAM > system. Definitely agreed! We must ensure portability to UNIX systems with their own PAM implementations. Implicit in my suggestion is that the API (shared across all these implementations) remains unchanged: we are simply talking about internal (inside the modules) code re-useability. (Our own site is Solaris...) > My personal preference would be for a '.a' library that gets built as > part of the Linux-PAM build and then as the modules are built, they link > in the relevant functions from that. This will help minimize > backward/forward compaitibility issues and help folk minimize the number > of 'pam' files they have to have on their system. There is an argument for the possibility of a ".so" library. (But don't let that distract us at the moment, nor the wider question of "libtool"!) > Finally, I don't see this sort of change as a 'major release' sort of > thing. OK. (I had suggested "major" simply because this was more than a trivial isolated-within-a-module patch...) The initial, and very real, hurdle would seem to be putting the initial structure in place in CVS. Andrew: is there any possibility that you, as CVS chief, could set the ball rolling, perhaps using one or more of "_pam_log()", "converse" and "make_remark()" as an example? That then gives us a real foundation for our own further suggestions and experiments. (My own chief interest, by the way, is the "pam_cracklib" module, which is basically a "pam_sm_chauthtok()" subroutine.) Hope that helps. -- : David Lee I.T. Service : : Systems Programmer Computer Centre : : University of Durham : : http://www.dur.ac.uk/t.d.lee/ South Road : : Durham : : Phone: +44 191 374 2882 U.K. :
