woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods) writes:

> As I understand it the primary purpose of PAM is to allow addition
> of new authentication mechanisms to binary-only systems.

The primary purpose of PAM is to make it easy to add new
authentication systems without having to rebuild every application
(which is what you have to do now in NetBSD). This is more important
in Solaris since you *can't* rebuild every application, but it's
pretty nice feature for any system.

> I would say that both Linux and Solaris mostly qualify as
> binary-only systems, but NetBSD does not.

So, how large share of our users do you think are actually building
everyting from source? How many of them would be able to add a new
authentication scheme to login? How many of them would be able to
apply a patch for a new authentication scheme to login without
assistance?

/Johan