Simon Geard wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 12:55 -0600, Matthew Burgess wrote:
>> *Appears* is the right intonation! The build fails without PAM and I
>> think I reported it a while ago, and upstream pretty much said
>> most/all distros use PAM so they weren't interested in fixing it.
>
> Well, they've got a point, there - PAM is *the* Linux authentication
> standard, since that's what all major distros use. There are more
> productive things for developers to do, than support an alternative
> authentication mechanism, just to please a minute fraction of their
> potential user base...
Yes, it certainly does. However...
I had an exchange with one of the Fedora support group about that.
I was gently (well, *I* thought it was gently) nudging them toward
giving the end user more control over what got installed, and he
was objecting to every suggestion I made. I wanted to be able not
to install lots of stuff they thought was mandatory, like SELinux.
At the end, he stated something with what seemed like some frustration
in his "tone" about "Well, you wouldn't want not to install PAM,
surely!"
Since I *don't* want to install PAM, and find it to be a major PITA
sometimes, and see no use for it whatsoever on my machine, I decided
that I just needed to hold my tongue. There was obviously a large
rift between any meeting of the minds between us. So large, that I
just didn't see any possibility. Our entire view of what should be
on a machine is just too different.
To put it another way, the current Linux world is something of an
outgrowth of the general Unix world, which is a multiuser server
type of environment, which is a vastly different one from what
is actually a single user computer sitting on my desk behind a
two deep hardware firewall. I've got a DSL modem which is actually
also a bridge doing NAT, with another router behind that also
doing NAT. No remote logins are permitted on my machine, and I don't
see the need for another firewall, another layer of authentication,
and SELinux on my machine. SELinux in particular is a vast intrusive
thing, and with the going rate of 1 defect per about 100 lines of
code, it's bound to be full of defects. 40 applications had to be
modified to accord with SELinux, as well as the kernel. I don't
run Apache, or any other protocol server, like httpd, etc., and
all my ports are "stealth", that is do not even respond "closed"
when queried. (Exception: old style e-mail authentication port)
Anyway, to make it shorter, the distros do *not* cater to people
like us who want small, lean, and essentially single user computers,
even where they could. It's just not worth their effort.
Even back with MSDOS, I used to delete a lot of the stuff which
got installed on my machine, since I just didn't use it. Stuff
like "join", etc.
Mike
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