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radiusd-freeradius history and future



[cc debian-devel]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 05:07:41PM +0100, Toni Mueller wrote:
>              [...]  Who withdrew [radiusd-freeradius] or caused it's
> withdrewal, then? Curious minds want to know, and also, it's a bit
> misty right now...

In order to keep radiusd-freeradius out of Woody, I filed a grave bug
report before Woody released claiming it was too buggy and poorly
documented to be supported by Debian.  I intended to keep the bug open
until it got closer to a 1.0 version or some of the more important bugs
had been squished and features documented.

A few months ago, the Sarge release coordinator swept all gravely-buggy-
older-than-3?-months packages from sid, including radiusd-freeradius.
Wichert immediately asked for the package to be added back, but someone
noted that freeradius, a GPL program, linked against libssl, so it
couldn't go back in.

Well, it doesn't _directly_ link against libssl, or I could try instead
to use gnutls.  In fact, the only place (I think!) radiusd-freeradius
"uses libssl" is its postgresql module, which links against libpq, which
requires libssl.  

(Though it's not directly required, I added "libssl" as a build-depends
earlier for someone who tried to build from source while postgresql was
transitioning from non-us, and he couldn't apt-get all of the dependencies
without adding lines to his sources.list, and he (I think) wanted explicit
dependencies on libssl. )

In the last six months or so, the freeradius upstream has made a much
better attempt at progress towards a stable version.  There's still no 
release manager, and "too many cooks in the kitchen," but it's getting
better.

Will freeradius be ready when Sarge releases?  I don't know.  Many people
(especially of the programmer mindset) are using freeradius CVS very
well, with no or few problems.  I'm not sure that the average "user"
could, though, especially if he tried to do all that freeradius claims to
be able to do.

In any case, I'm not satisfied that it's ready to be in at the moment.
Since "willing to support" is ultimately a function of the qualities of
the maintainer, I'm willing to step aside if someone else thinks it's
ready for Sarge and is willing to support it.  If not, I'll continue 
marching with upstream's slow plod toward "stable" and reinsert it into
Sid when it's ready.

						- chad

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