[Slackbuilds-users] Slackware and Plug'n'Play for removable devices

[Daniel de Kok]

On Sun, February 18, 2007 9:32 am, Niki Kovacs wrote:
> There's a funny french saying: "It might work in practice, but does it
> work in theory?"
> I'd say: take the last version of HAL that doesn't require PAM, e. g.
> 0.5.7.1, and build it as cleanly as possible. If that's a problem from a
> philosophical point of view, then think about how Slackware often
> includes what might seem dated versions of software (xorg 6.9, apache
> 1.3, kernel 2.4, ...) for various reasons. So why suddenly think "latest
> versions" when building HAL? Curiously enough, the vast majority of
> distributions including HAL - except the bleeding-edge ones like Arch -
> seem to rely on older versions. As for subsequent versions, there's
> another french saying for that. Tomorrow is another day.

The thing is that you need to backport security and reliability fixes, and
backporting stuff requires expertise and time. For Red Hat or SUSE it is
not a problem to do that, but it may be for individuals. I am not saying
it is not doable, but it requires dedication. I'd rather like to have no
HAL than HAL with holes :).

Of course, a good alternative is to settle on a HAL version used by Red
Hat for EL or maybe from Debian, and to cherry-pick security updates.
(Although there is not much cherry-picking involved, since most patches
can probably be copied verbatim.) Of course, this is not consistent with
the Slackware policy of vanilla packages. But as you say, it may work in
practice. Theory is not really important if you need to get the job done.

My personal opinion, though most people will probably disagree, is that
PAM support is long overdue. I have talked to some other people who
administrate Slackware systems, and the absense of PAM is a PITA for them,
some have moved on to other systems for that, and some other reasons. And
there is choice. Most (all?) Linux distributions use linux-pam, but
there's also openpam, that is used by NetBSD and FreeBSD. These projects
have high security standards, and openpam works very well on these
systems.

-- Daniel