Re: pam.conf(5) and pam(8)

From: Christian Brueffer <chris_at_unixpages.org>
Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:20:58 +0200
On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 07:07:27PM +0200, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Christian Brueffer <chris_at_unixpages.org> writes:
> > NetBSD has both pam.conf(5) and pam(8) that fit with OpenPAM FreeBSD
> > uses (NetBSD recently imported OpenPAM as well).  I'll import these
> > in the next couple of days.
> 
> Allow me to raise a few objections.
> 
> First, the reason why we don't have a pam(8) is that we have a rather
> comprehensive article about PAM in the doc tree, and I couldn't make
> up my mind about how much of it to include in pam(8) and how much to
> leave out.  My feeling now is that pam(8) should probably just
> reference the article and provide a quick overview of our PAM modules
> (with references to their individual man pages).
> 

That's what the NetBSD manpage mostly does.  Short description of the
functionality and the account, auth, password and session facilities.

> The reason why we don't have a pam.conf(5) is slightly more complex.
> Part of it is that the information that belongs there is already
> present in different places in different forms (/etc/pam.d/README for
> instance).  Another part is that it is *hard* to describe the meanings
> of the control flags both accurately and succintly.  NetBSD didn't get
> it quite right.  In addition, their man page is under a four-clause
> BSD license, which makes me leery of including it in OpenPAM.
> 

Ok.  The 'already documented' argument is valid, but I think a manpage
is much more accessible and visible than e.g. the README (actually I
never even noticed it's there). 

> My own attempt is in Perforce:
> 
> http://perforce.freebsd.org/fileViewer.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/openpam/doc/man/pam.conf.5&REV=2
> 

Looks good.

No idea on what we agree on, but the pam(8) and pam.conf(5) Xrefs that
lead to nowhere have to be fixed in some way before 6.0-RELEASE.

- Chris

-- 
Christian Brueffer	chris_at_unixpages.org	brueffer_at_FreeBSD.org
GPG Key:	 http://people.freebsd.org/~brueffer/brueffer.key.asc
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Received on Thu Jun 09 2005 - 16:21:02 UTC

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