Re: Good news re: man-db
On Wed, 22 Oct 1997, Paul Slootman wrote:
> I'm one of those considered "new readership", I guess...
> Having recently installed Debian on x86, and also owning an UDB Multia,
> I subscribed to this list to get a feeling for the Debian Alpha port, to
> discover what its state is, install tips, etc. In short, lurking a bit.
Welcome :)
> I currently run Red Hat 4.0 on my UDB.
Boooo...hehehe...just kidding :)
> A suggestion: as Red Hat apparently has PAM working on Alpha, couldn't
> you peek at Red Hat's sources to see what they've done to get it
> working? Or am I (still) missing the big picture here?
Well, kinda. Things are not as rosy with PAM on the Alpha as RedHat would
like everyone to believe. I see about 10+ PAM-related problems posted
every week on various RedHat lists and I haven't seen any *real* solutions
(only work-arounds).
Also, in the much-bigger picture, there is a huge difference right now
between Debian's and RedHat's Alpha dists...namely glibc versioning.
Right now, Debian is 100% glibc2 and has been for quite a while now.
RedHat is still using the 1.99 snapshots from last year. It may not seem
like a big deal, but MUCH has changed since their snapshots and, thus, any
patching that they make has to be checked over to account for those
changes before including their patches in with our stuff. In short, it's
a boatload of work sometimes (not to mention trying to figure out which
patches should even be applied in the first place...they're not really
illustrative in their naming convention regarding this).
Because of that glibc difference, among others, I try to shy away from
RedHat patches unless I run into a brick wall with my own efforts. Even
if I do look at their stuff, it's usually to get a basis for how to
correct a problem rather than to use their solution outright (their
netstat solution, IMO, was iffy at best).
> Personally, I dislike the PAM stuff (probably don't know enough about it).
> For example, I'm not allowed to use my usual password on my machine, as
> it's considered too short. I have not discovered how to override this.
> So I'm not really waiting for PAM :-)
PAM is pretty simple once you learn about it. The problem is, unless you
really care (which most normal users don't), it's not worth reading the
longwinded docs. I admit that I'm no PAM expert and really have no need
to implement most of the features offered by PAM since my "shop" is small
and security isn't a huge concern around here. I do see the need, though,
to have such libs, though. It really does make it easy to implement a
system-wide authentication policy and customise it without having to
recompile everything under the sun. With regards to your setup, I could
probably tell you how to fix that. Drop me a private e-mail and I'll see
what I can do.
> Anyway, that's my two cents.
Glad to hear it :) Gives me things to think about and it's always nice to
hear from people who don't normally chatter as much as I do :)
Chris
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