PAM modules

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Kostik Belousov <kostikbel at gmail.com> writes:
> Yes, the question of maintanence of the OpenLDAP code in the base
> is not trivial by any means. I remember that openldap once broke
> the ABI on its stable-like branch.

That's irrelevant.  Our own renamed subset of OpenLDAP would only be
used by our own code, primarily nss_ldap and pam_ldap, and would be
updated when and only when we decided that it needed updating, not every
time a new OpenLDAP release shipped.  We did this successfully with
expat (libbsdxml), and there's no reason why it wouldn't work with
OpenLDAP.

> Having API renamed during the import for the actively-developed
> third-party component is probably a stopper. I am aware of the rename
> done for ssh import in ssh_namespace.h, but I do not think such
> approach scale.

The entire point of ssh_namespace.h is to minimize the amount of changes
required.  Actually, when I say minimize, I mean "reduce to zero", and
the file itself is autogenerated, except for lining up the columns,
which I do manually.  I don't know why you think it doesn't scale.

I don't think we have anything to gain by writing our own LDAP library.
Firstly, new code means new bugs, and this is security-critical code.
Secondly, any LDAP client library we wrote would have to have an API
that closely paralells OpenLDAP's; otherwise, we would also have to
rewrite nss_ldap and pam_ldap.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no