… you don’t.
I’m not referring to PAM-less systems, I sincerely don’t care much about those. I’m referring to the dependencies of packages, which sometimes require sys-libs/pam even though they work fine with any PAM implementation.
My idea at the moment is to check for packages that can be ported to virtual/pam without code changes. I already found at least two, and there probably are others. The ones not working, are usually looking for the misc_conv symbol, which is provided by the libpam_misc library “proprietary” to Linux-PAM.
This falls into two lines of work for me, the first is that I’m trying to clean the area for Seraphim Mellos, who’s working on Summer of Code to support OpenPAM, the second is for Gentoo/FreeBSD, as there Linux-PAM is not used. Additionally, the less references directly to sys-libs/pam I have in the tree, the easier it will be when I decide to move it to sys-auth/Linux-PAM as it owe to be called.
Again, I wonder why am I stuck with this task as I usually don’t need PAM at all myself. I hope that getting a token changes something, so that I’d just have to key in the PIN of the token and be done with login too, but even that it’s a bit of a stretch for a standard user.
Anyway if somebody would like to help out, it would be nice if the packages using misc_conv were ported not to need it, most software doesn’t need it anyway. At the moment I know that sys-apps/qingy, sys-apps/busybox and app-misc/away don’t support OpenPAM as they require pam_misc.