[Pkg-shadow-devel] [lfs-dev] Shadow 4.2 packaging

[Christian PERRIER]

Quoting William Harrington (kb0iic at berzerkula.org):

> We will stick with 4.1.5.1 for now, but I'm curious at what is different in
> 4.2 which would prevent cross compile from working.
> You can view what we do here: http://cross-lfs.org/view/git/x86/boot/shadow.html
> 
> If you need us to test anything, we'd be glad to help.

Hell William (and others),

As of now, I rather need skills...:-)

Let me explain in details shadows's story.

Back in 2003-2004, I started working on it as.....French translator.

At that time, Tomasz Kłoczko was the main (and only developer).

I gradually coordinated the update of all translations in the
software, with the help of many translators from the Debian community.

One of them, my fellow colleague Nicolas François (who is as French as
I am....hence the cheese names for releases), joined me when Tomasz
wanted to stop developing and maintaining shadow. Contrary to me,
Nicolas was not only a translator, but also a skilled developer.

shadow began being maintained on Debian instrastructure (Alioth
server) and strongly targeted at Debian (mostly because the two of us
are deeply involved in Debian).....but we still separated the upstream
development from the Debian packaging.

So, between 2005 and 2011 we cleaned out shadow's bug log and Nicolas
did a lot of cleaning and improvements to the code, sometimes with the
help and suggestions by people from other distro environments.

Sadly, starting from about 2011, Nicolas' involvment in Debian and, as
a side effect, in shadow development, decreased slowly (a common
situation in FLOSS). He could maintain some peak activity from time to
time, resulting in a few releases.

The last peak was the work on integrating subuid support, on request
of many users, back in 2013....but that wasn't released officially.

During that time, I mostly remained as the only official Debian
developer in the shadow development "team"....and was doing my best to
keep things alive, even though my coding skills are close to
zero.....which doesn't help when dealing with an important part of
many Linux systems...:-)

Still, I managed to get enough help to assemble patches needed for
subuid support, thanks to some great work by Serge Hallyn and Eric
Biederman, and also switch the development repositories to modern VCS
(git).

And then, I recently decided to release all of this as "4.2". But most
of this work is not mine.

So, here's the situation. We have a fairly good piece of code....but
we need people with the appropriate skills to continue maintaining
it. I for myself can only act as a kind of coordinator and manage
incoming contributions.....

Not really the best situation but that's indeed what we have now....

The center point of all this is the
"pkg-shadow-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org" mailing list and....any
help is welcomed (Bruce Dubbs suggestions have been very helpful in
that regard and I would welcom any kind of help from the LFS
folks...even though I know veyr little about the project).





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