Re: kerberos

[Charles Wilson <cygwin at cwilson dot fastmail dot fm>]

Brian Dessent wrote:

> > 3) It looks like there are at least 3 binary sets of various versions of
> > krb5 available online ( http://cygutils.fruitbat.org/testing/release/krb5/,
> > and http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/~cplager/kerberos.html, and
> > http://www-clued0.fnal.gov/~axel/files/). By making this a package, at least
> > 3 people will save time. :)
>
> You should be asking those people why they chose to post packages on
> their own sites rather than step up and offer to maintain them as
> official packages.

Well, in my case (cygutils), it's because I was just playing around with 
getting krb to compile -- I was trying to get cvsnt to work, and at the 
time it explicitly required krb, while the cvshome (now ximbiot) 
"official" cvs merely had krb as an optional dependency.

However, I don't use kerberos, so I would be an ineffective maintainer. 
 Plus, I had (have) no intention of adding yet ANOTHER package to the 
already-too-long list of packages I maintain.  In order to help others 
by enabling them to avoid duplicating my efforts, I went ahead on posted 
my version where others could use it or take it over and ITP it themselves.

One of the problems I ran into was the conflict between the kerberos 
package's versions of telnet, ftp, etc  and those provided by inetutils. 
 This conflict is problematic (if krb tools are to go in /usr/bin) 
because you can't just say "install krb instead of inetutils" -- not 
only does krb DEPEND on inetutils, but krb doesn't provide everything 
that inetutils does -- which messes up OTHER packages that currently 
depend on inetutils.  e.g. krb is not a FULL replacement.  Plus, setup's 
dependency resolution scheme is not robust enough to help with 
"capabilities" == 'I need feature 'telnet.exe' and I don't care what 
actual package provides it'.  Setup's d.r.s is entirely package-driven: 
'I need package inetutils'.

Which is why I posted the following:

"RFD: A modest proposal #1: /opt"
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2003-04/msg00305.html

This was eventually approved IIRC, but to date nobody maintaining an 
official cygwin package has found it necessary to use the /opt tree. 
I'd recommend any future maintainer intending to ITP kerberos do so.

Also, now that the 'alternatives' package is available, it might be 
beneficial to work with the inetutils maintainer to use the 
'alternatives' machinery to allow end-users to switch between the 
inetutils and kerberos versions of telnet, ftp, etc.  (You'd still IMO 
want to use /opt for the "real" kerberos installation.  The inetutils 
maintainer would need to agree to relocate the inetutils "real" 
executables to /usr/lib/inetutils/ or something, tho.)

> By the way, topics about packaging belong on the cygwin-apps (at)
> cygwin.com mailing list, not here.

IMO, that isn't true in this case.  cygwin-apps is for discussing the 
packaging of *existing* apps, or ITP and followon discussion of new 
ones.  If the OP decides to ITP kerberos, then THAT should go to 
cygwin-apps.

--
Chuck

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