[gentoo-dev] PAM 0.75-r3: Failure

[gentoo-dev] PAM 0.75-r3: Failure

[Bruce A. Locke]

Hello...

After spending almost three solid nights working on it I've given up
trying to upgrade so we can have pam_stack and pam_console.  After
spending hours trying to track down the source of an error, changing
pam.d files a zillion times, recompiling pam and shadow a zillion times,
etc, I'm giving up for now.

I keep getting the same retarded undescriptive error message over and
over (PAM_ABORT) which is _only_ used in 83+ different parts of the pam
source code I'm getting nowhere.  Whoever coded Pam obviously was
alergic to logging real error messages and just have every damn test
return error codes.

As far as I can tell the problem only affected the shadow package
(passwd, chfn, etc).  But thats a serious enough problem on its own.

Some interesting facts:

The latest official release is Pam 0.75

- Redhat 7.2 ships Pam 0.75 with over 50 patches, not including
pam_stack and friends which are not in Pam 0.75
- Redhat ships with a copy of shadow-utils thats a month or two older
then our current unmasked one
- Shadow-4 will not build against Pam 0.75 + Redhat patches
- Mandrake ships pam as a big tarball with many of the Redhat patches
and most likely a few of its own
- Mandrake ships with a passwd command that _isn't_ part of the shadow
package ( no, it didn't work either :( )
- Debian is stuck at Pam 0.73...?

What does it mean? Hell if I know :(

Sorry folks... if anyone wants to take a crack at it feel free... I'd
recommend starting with the mandrake tarball.  Its alot easier then
dealing with 50+ patches.

-- 

Bruce A. Locke
blocke@shivan.org