As I failed to prepare some write up for the GWN about this, I think I should at least put a notice on the blog, that people will almost certainly link on the forums for the people who will, certainly, complain about the upgrade.
While the upgrade to 0.99 is basically painless for almost all users, some will experience ebuilds dying if they have orphan files in /etc/pam.d, and others might need to install extra packages to be able to use their specific PAM configuration.
For this, a guide has been written: the Linux-PAM 0.99 upgrade guide. I made sure that the most common searches on Google points to that guide, so that users with a little clue, googling, would find it easily. For the people who experience failures due to old modules being used, the guide is also linked in the postinst messages.
If you know how your system works and what you did to it, the upgrade will be as easy as breathing; if you don’t, you might find strange that things like cron, gdm/kdm, dovecot and other services doesn’t let you in anymore… I found these suggestions too obvious for the upgrade guide, but seems like there are at least some users who don’t have a clue about the common practices about Gentoo systems administration, so they might come useful:
- always check what is going to be upgraded, or if you’re so crazy to use automatic scheduled upgrades, make sure to check what has been updated;
- always run etc-update without discarding configuration files changes at the first glance if you don’t understand them (this is critical or you might not be able to login on your system anymore after Linux-PAM upgrade);
- when you upgrade PAM, restart the services using it, like vixie-cron, dovecot, xdm/gdm/kdm/entrance, and so on (the same applies if you upgrade OpenSSL: restart Apache, Dovecot, and other services that might be providing SSL-based connections).
Now again, please read the Linux-PAM 0.99 upgrade guide, and if you’re still wondering: the package is named sys-libs/pam, but the official name is Linux-PAM, even if it runs fine on FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD and GNU Hurd.