krb5-auth-dialog and the news

bgstack15 — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 13:07:04 GMT

With the most recent month's OS updates for Devuan GNU+Linux, I discovered that krb5-auth-dialog has now been updated for the first time in 4+ years!

The GNOME people have now removed the tray icon, which is the entire reason I wanted the software! So I downgraded to krb5-auth-plugin=3.26.1-4 and that now behaves like I want it to.

I was perusing /r/linux (that's a subreddit, if the syntax is unfamiliar to you) and came across Kerberos authentication on the Librem 5 which links to a Purism blog post by Guido Günter, one of the maintainers of krb5-auth-dialog. The screenshots in his article about kerberos on a Purism phone show krb5-auth-dialog, updated for a GTK4 and mobile world! I'm sure his changes fit nicely with that paradigm, and it's good that the software is still maintained.

That being said, its modern incarnation is useless on a real workstation so I reverted it. I had to download it and store it in a local apt repository.

Maybe someday I will fork krb5-auth-dialog into krb5-auth-trayicon and merge any changes (such as build with meson instead of GNU Make) that do not relate to deleting the tray icon. There are 122 commits and 119029 lines in the git diff between branches.

Depending on third-party packages or repos

bgstack15 — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 14:12:56 GMT

A recent incident has caught my attention, where a Ubuntu PPA owner decided to restrict access to his PPAs after some bad feelings he got from an interaction with a stingy company. As many in the reddit thread commented, it is unwise to pull in dependencies from third-parties. You cannot always expect them to remain available, or always trust them. In fact, you probably shouldn't trust them. Obviously, there is a wide spectrum of opinions on the topic. This isn't a moral issue, but it is an important possibly business-continuity one.

Disclosures for my public repositories

I package some programs myself, for Fedora/CentOS and Devuan ceres. Of course they have dependencies, and a few even have some third-party dependencies. For some of my projects, I have actually taken the effort to package up their dependencies as well so my repositories are sufficient (with main distro repos of course) for the actual package I care about. I made the decision on CentOS 6, because I don't actually have any extant systems myself, that I will rely on third-party repositories for some key dependencies. I am uncertain this information is publicly viewable on the copr, and I do not wish to hide it. The copr front page shows that the various repos are "[Modified]" but they do not provide links to what additional repositories they depend on. And the EPEL8 dependencies are because there were no official repos hosting certain packages yet, but that should rectified over time.

copr://bgstack15/stackrpms/epel-6-i386
- copr://ewdurbin/pythons-el6
- copr://mlampe/devtoolset-7
copr://bgstack15/stackrpms/epel-8-x86_64
- https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/playground/$releasever/Everything/$basearch/os
- My own repo for a few things that couldn't be built on copr because of weird dependency issues at the time: http://example.no-ip.biz/repo/rpm/ (redacted). Of course I trust this one, but should you?
- copr://nikitines/XFCE

Holiday greetings

Also, happy holidays or Merry Christmas or whatever holiday greetings you want. This post was originally published on December 22, 2019 so it's the last one before Christmas.

Knowledge Base (Posts about news)

krb5-auth-dialog and the news

Depending on third-party packages or repos

Disclosures for my public repositories

Holiday greetings