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Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2013 08:26:48 +0000
From: Arthur Chance <freebsd@qeng-ho.org>
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To: ASV <asv@inhio.eu>
Subject: Re: just a curiosity about auth.conf
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On 01/01/13 12:33, ASV wrote:
> Good afternoon and happy new year to everybody.
>
> I'm just curious about auth.conf.
>
> According to the detailed release notes
> (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/relnotes-detailed.html):
> "auth.conf(5) has been removed because it was deprecated years
> ago.[r238481]"
>
> but according to the man pages online AUTH.CONF(5) of FBSD9.0-RELEASE:
> "auth.conf contains various attributes important to the authentication
> code, most notably crypt(3) for the time being. This documentation will
> be updated as the /etc/auth.conf file, which is very new, evolves.".
>
> How can something deprecated years ago being new and evolving quickly
> enough to require further doc updates? Am I missing something? :)

Looks like the man page hasn't been updated in a while. If you're not 
yet on 9.1, and look at auth.conf itself it says in the header comments

# Configure some authentication-related defaults.  This file is being
# gradually subsumed by user class and PAM configuration.

I.e. it is/was an old way of doing things that has been replaced by 
newer mechanisms. Personally I'm glad to see the team clearing out the 
cruft.