Author: seemant

So let’s start off with this: Happy Easter to those who celebrate it.

Congrats to Chris, Benni, Tim, and everyone on the releng team for putting out the 2005.0 release. The delay was worth it for sure. Not that I’m Ryan Seacrest or anything, but this was the best liveCD ever.

Finally, after being here since 2001, someone criticises me for something. Too bad it was for just one line of posting rather than an actual, you know, mistake, but at least the smugness of some of the posts (and links) is pretty entertaining.

Now, on to business: as you know, Vapier put in the com_err stuff and put in a masked e2fsprogs to use that stuff. Finally the time has arrived to fix0r up the kerberi to take advantage of this stuff so they can, once and for all, stop stomping all over the place. I’ll be working on that during this week, so if you’re in the mood to test and possibly break stuff, stay tuned. In the meantime, by the way, prelim tests indicate that that new-fangled e2fsprogs works just fine.

Donnie, “rich” is the least of my spiffs with The Microsoft Way (TM) (C)Eternity, The Microsoft Corporation. Most of all, in my eyes, it’s their abject refusal to co-operate with anyone NotMicrosoft.

So it’s now Sunday (hence still the weekend, hence no heimdal), and I have nothing better to do than to pimp for a minimac.

So, the
mozilla moves that I did (amongst others from net-www to www-client) did not go so well. At first, I forgot to update the updates file for mozilla and firefox, and then mozilla-launcher’s move caused some dep corruption for people. The remedy, if you are experiencing this after a recent sync is to rm -rf /var/cached/edb/dep/* && emerge –metadata. My humblest apologies to everyone who got bitten by this bug.

Now, shout outs to SpankY for getting com_err and libss into portage. Now we can remove the building of those from the next e2fsprogs, and fix up the kerberi (and afs apparently as well) to just DEPEND/RDEPEND on those. Yay!

So, to add to things, Robin e-mailed me saying that since vimap and c-client are both based on uw-imap, they should be tested against kerberos. And, from the
comment to my previous post: php and, one presumes mod_php, don’t particularly work (during configure) against heimdal.

So apparently I missed Donnie’s reply to my blog in his blog. Sorry about that, Donnie. In fact, it seems a few distros are doing the /var/lib/heimdal thing and have been doing so for a while. I’ll definitely talk with upstream about it.

Owing to Langthang’s comment yesterday, I’ll start a new list for packages in portage which do *not* compile against heimdal. They are:

nfs-utils
uw-imap

So, in Kerberos update news, SpankY and vapier have agreed to break out com_err, et, and ss into a separate package. Rather than have three different packages, we decided to go with one since e2fsprogs apparently needs all 3, and the kerberi require at least 2 out of those 3 (not the same 2 either). Additionally, iFlame has been looking into removing the com_err and et stuff from the freebsd-ubin and freebsd-libs packages for the Gentoo/FBSD project. I’m currently investigating what else (apart from e2fsprogs and the kerberi) actually requires any of the three so that DEPEND and/or RDEPEND strings can be updated.

The other concern is which version of com_err to go with. I’m inclined to go with heimdal’s patched version first and see if e2fsprogs will build against that. Major major major huge shout outs to SpankY.

The list of packages so far is (collecting here before emailing this list to spanky):

e2fsprogs
heimdal
MIT’s kerberos
fetchmail

So let’s talk kerberos for a second. We all know about heimdal and MIT’s reference implementation (whatever that means) and so on. In Gentoo, at the moment, the two block each other — meaning you can not have both installed at once. This causes some problems because if you have a predilection to, say, heimdal, oftentimes portage will ask you to unmerge it so that it can merge mit-krb5 as a dependency for something else. The latest example is the newest nfs-utils release. Which brings me back around to try and solve the problem of having cohabitating kerberi on your gentoo system.

The current proposal that I’ve discussed with Ryan a few weeks ago involves:

1. Since both kerberi (and probably shishi, which it not in portage yet, but I’m looking into it) install a few common files, we’d remove those to a kerberos-common package which would be a runtime dependency for all the kerberi. This package would contain also a script to switch the system’s kerberos similar to gcc-config and the like (and at this point, it’s probably better to just write up an eclectic plugin. This would solve the blocking implementations problem.

Oh listen, while we’re on the subject of heimdal, I’d really like to have /var/heimdal moved to /var/lib/heimdal, but I don’t want to break people’s setups. I believe the latter to be more FHS-correct.

2. The other problem is more of an issue related to my neuroses than anything else. To take the latest example (see nfs-utils above) — it fails to compile with heimdal. And someone else had issues compiling something against heimdal, for whom I gave a hacky fix (basically renaming the filenames being #included). So I’m thinking maybe some compatibility symlinks for both mit- and heimdal, and some other work to make packages which need kerberos be actually implementation-agnostic.

Having said all this, I’m not in any way, shape or form, kerberos proficient, so I’m definitely open to input and opinions and comments and criticisms (though I’d prefer critiques which tend to be more productive).

But wait, there’s more: at the moment, there’s collisions in the installed files between heimdal and e2fsprogs. So we’re trying to breakout comerr and et out of e2fsprogs and make that a dependency of both anyway (if I remember correctly, both kerberi need et at least).

Unlike some people I’m fine with talking like a valley girl, like sometimes. So I’m proudly posting my first ever blog entry. I’ll use this space to cover some gentoo ideas and maybe I’ll make a category of postings about non-gentoo thoughts. I’d like to make a shout out to my wife.

By the way, major shout-outs to Daniel for even getting this Planet started, and signing me up with an account so fast. Daniel rocks, as you well know and has continued to rock.