Posts for October 2021

2021-10-17: pam-krb5 4.11

The primary change in this release of my Kerberos PAM module is support for calling pam_end with PAM_DATA_SILENT. I had not known that the intent of this flag was to signal that only process resources were being cleaned up and external resources should not be (in part because an older version of the man page doesn't make this clear).

This flag is used when a proces forks with an open PAM library handle and wants to clean it up in the child process. In previous versions, this would delete the user's ticket cache, which is not the desired behavior. This version correctly leaves the ticket cache alone.

The implementation required some improvements to the PAM testing framework to support this case as well.

The other significant change in this release is that the build system no longer attempts to guess the correct PAM module installation path and instead documents that to install the module in a Linux system PAM module path, you will probably need to set --libdir explicitly. The logic used to decide between Debian and Red Hat multiarch paths broke in the presence of Debian usrmerge systems and was incredibly fragile even before that, so I've now dropped it completely.

You can get the latest version from the pam-krb5 distribution page.

2021-10-17 16:00 — Permanent link

2021-10-17: rra-c-util 10.0

It's been a while since I pushed out a release of my collection of utility libraries and test suite programs, so I've accumulated quite a lot of chanages. Here's a summary; for more, see the NEWS file.

• Remove RRA_SET_LIBDIR macro, previously used by PAM modules to guess the install path.
• Fix RRA_SET_LDFLAGS to always use the multilib directory if it exists, required for OpenSSL 3.0 support.
• Perl tests and test support libraries now require Perl 5.10 or later.
• Update RRA_LIB_PYTHON to use sysconfig by preference.
• Fix SUN_LEN on macOS X Big Sur.
• Add support for testing pam_end argments to the PAM testing framework.
• Fix error handling in portable k_haspag replacement if getgroups fails.
• Avoid deprecation warnings in Autoconf macros from Autoconf 2.71.
• Work around fallout for Perl::Critic tests from the renaming of Perl::Critic::Freenode to Perl::Critic::Community, and suppress warnings that I haven't found useful.
• Tweak the perltidy configuration.
• Add a new t/docs/changes.t Perl module test for the format of Changes files.

You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.

2021-10-17 21:57 — Permanent link