Re: FYI & question: Linux-PAM modules on Solaris

[Nicolas Williams <Nicolas Williams ubsw com>]

On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 10:09:42AM +0100, David Lee wrote:
> About a year ago, I began submitting some Solaris portability patches to
> Linux-PAM.  Many of these have been incorporated by Andrew, so it is now
> much better than it was then.
> 
> But one of the outstanding issues is the need to get to grips seriously
> with use of autoconf, and with these linking issues.
> 
> Understandably, Andrew is reluctant to be too "adventurous" in this area: 
> the project was originally designed for Linux, it works there, so he is
> understandably cautious about changes.
> 
> Alas, every OS does linking differently.  Indeed, even within an OS, it
> will vary between compilers (eg. the native one and gcc).

You might want to look at the pam_krb5 module (devl branch). It
configures and compiles and links on Solaris and Linux (and at some
point recently it worked on FreeBSD as well, but I may have broken that
recently, and I cannot test it).

> I suspect that what is really needed is to face this dilemma head-on
> (which will need a little courage!) and to introduce "libtool", which is
> specifically and purposefully designed for exactly these problems.  (In
> the past "libtool" received a bad press because it wasn't perfect (what
> is?).  But it is far better now, constantly improving, and we are, I hope,
> looking to the future...)

Libtool may be too heavy-weight for PAM methinks. To start on
multi-platform support just a few autoconf macros should suffice.
Eventually it might be easier to libtoolize.

> For the immediate problem: I had understood that generally the best way to
> do linking with "gcc" is to invoke it via "gcc" itself, letting it choose
> its preferred way (whether native "ld" or GNU "ld", as determined when gcc
> was itself installed).  That is: the command we invoke should probably be
> of the form "gcc ..." rather than "ld ...". 

Maybe, but what if you want to use Sun's C compiler?

> Hope that helps.
> 
> -- 
> 
>:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :


Cheers,

Nico
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