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Re: Bug#151613: xbase-clients: xauth (for ssh) should be its own package



[Ccing debian-x.  Volunteers wanted!]

On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 08:27:49PM -0400, Christopher Curtis wrote:
> >Yes, it's wishlist.  The strength of your desire to see a change made
> >has no bearing on a bug's severity.
> 
> 8-(

Well, think about it.  Such things are highly subjective.  You can read
about the meanings of Debian bug severities at:

http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer

The definitions are not perfectly objective, but they are a little
better than letting the submitter's annoyance level dictate the
severity.

> That much makes sense to me.  I would expect to have to download *some* 
> X11 library stuff for xauth, but what I downloaded seemed excessive.
[...]
> I don't mean to ask much, and I hope I'm not.
> 
> Mark me wishlist if you must; I petition for "normal"  ;-)

The bug report is a feature request; you're requesting a new package.
Therefore "wishlist" is the proper severity.

What you, and other people who have complained that they "just want
xauth and nothing else" really want is a simple tool for manipulating
.Xauthority files.  Presumably this would be a clone of the existing
xauth without the "generate" functionality (see xauth(1x)).

Such a version of xauth would not, I think, need to link against the X
libraries at all; a few simple utility functions from the X libraries
could be duplicated in its source code, but nothing as complex as
XOpenDisplay() which is used only by the "generate" function.

Such a utility would be packaged separately, or included in the xutils
package.  Which of these courses of action would be taken would likely
depend on how XFree86 felt about including such a tool in a future
upstream release.  This tool -- perhaps it could be called "minixauth"
or "uxauth" ("u" for the Greek "mu" meaning "micro" in SI prefix
nomenclature) -- would need to be licensed under MIT/X11 terms to be
acceptable to XFree86.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |    Any man who does not realize that
Debian GNU/Linux                   |    he is half an animal is only half a
branden@debian.org                 |    man.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |    -- Thornton Wilder

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