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by timhh 20 hours ago
Yeah I always thought the whole architecture of PAM being a library is weird. A sane person would have made it a Daemon that processes talk to surely?

Really it should probably be part of SystemD, but I know that would anger the anti-SystemD zealots.

2 comments

> A sane person would have made it a Daemon that processes talk to surely?

> Really it should probably be part of SystemD

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/39855

It's confusing how they want a custom protocol that seems to be converging from JSON-RPC, just spelled differently. They should just use JSON-RPC. In any case, it'd essential to retain PAM's customization ability even if the bulk of the work is moved out-of-process.
Not everything has to be a "daemon". It's a bad trend in current programming zeitgeist to want to make everything into one. (sccache, no, you do NOT need a daemon to behave like ccache.)

For a PAM replacement, you want a separate process. It doesn't have to be a persistent separate process.