As binutils is still not fixed (vapier provided me a patch that should embody all the changes done by freebsd, but still doesn’t work so I think the problem is in a missing script), and so I can’t really fix xorg, I’m trying to fix other problems with G/FBSD porting.
There are a couple of major issues with it, which still needs to be fixed, which I want to state here so that other devs can read and know how to deal with them in the future 🙂
First problem is PAM-related: pam_stack.so module used to mimic other auth configuration files is just an hack done by RedHat that works just on Linux-PAM and not on OpenPAM which is the implementation used by FreeBSD. To do the same thing, OpenPAM and Linux-PAM 0.78 uses the include directive, which works fine on both systems. Unfortunately, too many files in the tree depends on pam_stack, and stable Linux-PAM doesn’t support include directive, so they can’t just be fixed in the main file, but needs a revbump and a parallel file in the mean time.
I’m taking care of this problem filing bugs aobut packages which uses pam_stack.so.
The second problem is with many ebuilds which resets permissions.. they use root:root as owner:group, but root group doesn’t exists on FreeBSD (so neither on G/FBSD), and this needs to be changed to root:whell which works fine on all Gentoo systems.
I’ve just created a list of ebuilds which suffers from the problem, and they are many more than you can imagine. I hope to be able to fix most of them, but if I start reporting one by one it will take too many bugs so I ’ll just open one bug CCing the maintainers while I found them. I’ll start tomorrow with that.
The third problem is with “cp -a”. cp command accepts -a parameter only on GNU’s version, so using it with non-gnu’s cp will fail. The right fix for this is just use cp -dpR (actually it’s -dpPR, but -P is not POSIX, so..). I haven’t listed them for now, but it’s still a problem.
Well.. time to see how many other packages I can fix before going to my LUG for the meeting.
Would it be possible to use OpenPAM on linux as well? I was reading the site, and apparently, it should work on Linux as well as F/BSD, or did I read incorrectly?