Comments on the rlogin/kcmd thread

[Sam Hartman]

Hi.  I realize it's been a while since I brought up the issue of
dropping appls/bsd from the MIT tree and I wanted to give you all an
update on our current thinking.

First, we're not (and never were) planning on taking any action for
the 1.3 release with regard to this issue.  The 1.3 release will
contain appl/bsd just as the 1.2 releases currently do.  There have
been some bug fixes applied, but you can read about that in the
development snapshot ChangeLog.

Second, discussion made it clear that we are going to be unable to
end-of-life the rlogin/rsh technology.  We need to find some third
party who is willing to maintain those applications or we will likely
run into vseveral independently maintained forks of the code base.
That is, we're going to need to treat appl/bsd much like telnet and
ftp.  There was discussion of forming a group to maintain these
applications here; that seems like a great idea.  As an individual I'd
be interested in contributing to that effort.


Finally, some concerns were raisd that dropping the applications would
make Kerberos less attractive to new users and might harm the
technology.  So far, we haven't seen justification of that concern
sufficient to make us want to continue maintaining the applications.
We are interested in any additional arguments in this area.

Thanks,

--Sam