Comments on the rlogin/kcmd thread

[Donn Cave]

Quoth hartmans at mit.edu (Sam Hartman):
...
| 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.

A couple of ambiguous points there - "dropping" means handing off to
someone else, "the applications" means telnet, ftp and appl/bsd?
Seems like they have a few years left of life in them, assuming
no miracles for ssh2 Kerberos.  It might be a big step forward to
get them out of MIT's hands, though that entirely depends on where
they go from there.  Is that what you mean, or were you thinking
that everyone already has all their own applications?  Or that the
viability of Kerberos at a site isn't adversely affected by one or
two less supportable Kerberized services?

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu