Re: Second shot at PAM
On Sun, Oct 29, 2000 at 11:14:50AM +0400, Stefanus Du Toit wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 29, 2000 at 03:02:15PM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > All patches are aimed at upstream. Debian only patches are bad, we want to
> > distribute software, not fork it.
>
> I thought so, in any case, using __GNU__ is definitely not the Right
> Thing (unless you really can't do it otherwise).
I wouldn't support such a blank statement, as there are several cases where
__GNU__ is not only fine but the correct thing to do. For one, it is the
right thing for software that is not feature based but OS based (sometimes
this happens, but more often it is a mixture of both, and then it gets
really ugly, see X). Then, it is good to use it for kludges to make
something work where it's really a bug in the Hurd.
It is sometimes correct to do it when glueing code from other OS's, like
the linux ip stack in pfinet, or linux device drivers in Linux.
And sometimes it might be easier to use __GNU__ to enable Hurd specific
features, although autoconf checks for the Hurd libraries you use is better
of course.
> > [...]
> >
> > Anyway, if an author doesn't bother about POSIX, but adds __GNU__ patches to
> > support the Hurd system, there is something seriously wrong.
>
> Thanks for summing this up very well, you said just about what I was
> going to say :)
I had to make a small retreat btw. In this particular case, I don't think
checking sysconf should be included in the patch. This is really something
you can leave to th authors if they want that. But using dynamic allocation
on all systems is usually fine, so why bother to check for a hard limit if
the code doesn't need one.
> Now if only VMWare's virtual partition didn't get corrupted half the
> time in GNU, or if I could get plex86 to work, or another machine, I
> could be sending patches here myself.
[Insert usual boilerplate about VMWare not being free software here]
> Marcus, I saw on the plex86 list that you tried to get gnumach/hurd
> booting at some point. How far have you gotten with this?
I am watching plex86, and I think Yoshinori does, too, although probably
only as far as GRUB is concerned and not GNU Mach. I would like to try out
the latest version, which can run linux well, but plex86 does not work on
linux 2.4, which I have installed, so I have to wait. If someone has linux
2.2, they could try out plex86 (www.plex86.com) CVS version and tell us how
far they come...
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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