remctl 3.17

remctl is a simple GSS-API-based RPC system designed to be as trivial to deploy as possible for sites already using Kerberos.

I owe various people deeper reviews of remctl feature changes, but alas this release is not that. This is a bit of a stopgap maintenance release primarily to fix a testing problem on Debian that booted remctl out of testing. The basic problem is that a lot of test machinery assumes that every system will have an IPv4 address available, but this is not necessarily true on modern systems. This release only fixes the tests that don't use Kerberos. The tests that require Kerberos have much deeper assumptions that the IPv4 loopback will be available, and will require later work (hampered by the fact that I personally don't have such an environment readily available that also has access to a KDC and need to construct something in Docker or some similar container system).

This release also adds support for PHP 8 in anticipation of a possible Debian migration (some minor C source cleanup was required, nothing major), fixes some Python build system problems, and incorporates the changes from rra-c-util 8.4.

For future releases, I am considering removing the language bindings from the remctl distribution and distributing them separately as stand-alone tarballs. The primary reason for this is to more easily upload those packages to the respective repositories for those languages (particularly Perl and Python; I don't know how the Ruby and PHP ones work and would need to find out), thus making them available to tools like cpanm and pip as long as the C libraries were already installed. The cost is that someone who wants the C libraries and the extensions will have to download multiple tarballs, and someone (not me) will have to create separate Red hat spec files for the various language bindings.

If this would cause problems for you, let me know. It's not likely to happen soon since it would require some major reworking of my web page publication software, but once I finish the prerequisites, I'm likely to adopt this approach unless there are objections.

You can get the latest release from the remctl distribution page.