Some more PAM plans

So, I’m still working on the PAM documentation; in particular, I’m working on splitting up what initially was a single guide, because I found it was coming too complex and too long, and it was deemed to scare the devs away. Plus, there are still some concepts that are good for users as well as developers, so it would make more sense to move it in their own “shared” guides.

I’ll probably commit some of the documentation later today, and then continue working on the rest, leaving Josh to clean the grammar up 🙂

But, while trying to reorganise documentation and packages, I also started wondering about a few other things, for instance I’m certainly going, in the next weeks, to work on a proof of concept of a pambase package, carrying system-auth, login, and xdm configuration files. The idea of this is that if PAM changes syntax, I can just change one package to handle it.

At the same time, this would allow to provide simpler management of common optional PAM modules; for instance adding consolekit support for login, GDM, XDM and KDM would just need an USE flag to pambase, and then the default installed configuration would be updated.

Of course this transition won’t happen anytime soon, considering that PAM 0.99 is scheduled to be marked stable for September, I doubt this could go in use before next year, but it’s something that might for the future.

Comments, as usual, welcome, as well as bribes and sponsors 🙂