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Date:      Sun, 24 Mar 2002 09:29:21 -0500 (EST)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
To:        cjclark@alum.mit.edu
Cc:        Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/usr.bin/chpass chpass.c pw_copy.c pw_copy.h
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1020324092407.47668W-100000@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <20020324041506.K48968@blossom.cjclark.org>

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On Sun, 24 Mar 2002, Crist J. Clark wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 08:11:20AM -0500, Robert Watson wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, Mark Murray wrote:
> > 
> > > > This is all quite a mess. We have chpass(8) using __pw_scan from libc
> > > > and source in vipw(8), and PAM modules sharing all of this code
> > > > too. Wouldn't the Right Thing be to put these functions in a library
> > > > somewhere? I think NetBSD has a lot of this stuffed in libutil.  
> > > 
> > > There is a lot of password-related stuff spread about the tree in this
> > > messy way (chpass, vipw, chsh(and friends), passwd and so on). I would
> > > vote very strongly for such a change. 
> > > 
> > > I started doing it some time ago, and lost track in the tangled thread. 
> > 
> > A remarkably number of userland tools assume that access to passwd
> > information is in libc.  Would such a change move this completely out of
> > libc and require modifying the linkages involved for all of these, or is
> > this a lower-level kind of thing?
> 
> I think I've sorted out most of the dependencies here:

I think what's going on here is I was confusing your intent to move
password file editing routines out of libc with an intent to move password
file access routines out of libc.  Use of the editing routines is
restricted to relatively few programs, as you point out.  I was thinking
that you meant to move things like getpwuid() and getpwnam() out, which
have enourmous numbers of dependencies, even within libc (for example, the
ACL acl_from_text() and acl_to_text() calls).  Likewise, even things like
ls depend on them.  If it's just the routines to modify password files, I
have no problem at all with the change.  :-)

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Project
robert@fledge.watson.org      NAI Labs, Safeport Network Services


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