Re: Is it something I said? re:locking

[Micah Cowan]

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Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
> All,
> 
> I apologize if I've argued a bit fervently in the past for what I felt
> was a simple feature (i.e. support for screen to also use the "attach"
> password as a "lock" password on systems that do not support either pam
> or getpass() and thus have no way of knowing what password to otherwise
> use to lock the screen.)

I don't believe it's as simple as you imagine. It requires some
significant (though perhaps not _large_) changes.

> I feel like I may have overexplained things, or maybe in speaking to a
> linux crowd that's somehow used to pam working, have needled out my
> edge-case.

PAM isn't Linux. PAM is on a large variety of platforms; the chief one
missing would probably be OpenBSD. I mean, even AIX and HP-UX have it.

I'd be interested in support for "BSD Authentication" alongside PAM
support, but I would not be interested in implementing or maintaining it
personally; someone else would have to wear that hat.

> At any rate, I got zero replies after a certain point.

The point at which I stopped participating was the point where I didn't
feel I had anything new to add.

> What I am asking for is a patch of likely less-than-five-lines that will
> not change any behavior for people outside this edge case (since it's
> within "#ifndef pam").

I don't think it'd be less than five lines, or else those less-than-five
lines would be unlikely to have effects of low significance: either the
foreground screen would need to read the configuration file (and deal
with odd cases such as the config file moving or having been specified
via an environment variable), looking for just a single line, or else
the protocol would need to be altered to have the background screen
communicate the password hash to the foreground screen (probably as part
of the same packet it sends when the alarm is triggered). The latter is
probably by far the easiest/most-straightforward way to achieve this,
but it still requires significant energy. I wouldn't necessarily be
against something like that, but if I agreed to it, it'd be pretty low
priority for me to implement. There are just too many more pressing
things to be done. Basically, someone else with a particular interest in
it needs to do it, or you may have to wait for it quite a while - it
would also help for a couple additional voices to speak up in favor of it.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
GNU Maintainer: wget, screen, teseq
http://micah.cowan.name/
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