[PATCH] a library and, uh, a PAM module

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 11:45 +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> Sounds good. Just one thing, why environment variables and not pam
> items, for the tty and display? And it would certainly make sense to
> have those 2 items part of standard pam.

I thought about that but PAM items are integers and CKCON_TTY and
CKCON_X11_DISPLAY are somewhat non-standard things... the way PAM works
is that it sets PAM_TTY to either /dev/tty1 (for e.g. /bin/login) or
":20" (for gdm-ish) and that's an accepted convention as far as I
understand... so using PAM items for this would require patching PAM and
I don't think this is feasible nor desirable.

Plus, you really want your login manager to have native ConsolKit
support (rather than a PAM module) so you can feed in more hints.. this
PAM module is more of a stop-gap solution because the RH util-linux
maintainer wanted it that way for /bin/login. Sure, this PAM module
might be useful too for wdm, kdm  but I think the position of the
ConsoleKit team (or me at least; can't speak for Jon) is that you want
to call into ConsoleKit from your app... heck, you already have to patch
e.g. wdm to set/unset these environment variables.

     David