[RFC][PATCH] krb5 => libverto main loop

[Ken Raeburn]

On Aug 19, 2011, at 21:28, Ezra Peisach wrote:

> Centos 5 - which is close to rhel5...
> 
> libevent 1.4 (too old)
> no libev
> glib 2.1.16, 2.12 with updates
> 
> I do not know if glib is universally available on all platforms 
> supported... Some of the new glib releases assume a recent linux 
> kernel.  They have not been good at maintaining compatibility with 
> non-bleeding edge.

Sadly, that seems to be common... and good luck if you want to run one application which requires a bleeding-edge version of an external library, and a second application which requires a specific older version of that same library...

> I think a minimal list of supported platforms will be required - so as 
> to define what the requirements are.

That's a tricky phrase, "supported platforms".  There's a nebulous middle ground of "platforms we don't officially support but we're happy to accept reasonable patches for if you can do the work", and that gets more complicated when you start demanding current versions of additional external libraries.

> Does Solaris ship with glib? Does the various BSD flavors?  Do we know 
> what "old" O/S are out there that
> people will still need to compile kerberos on?  Will there be a need to 
> enable a compile option - that does
> not compile a kdc? (i.e. a client only build?)

NetBSD appears to have libevent-1.4.12 in their main source tree, but libev 4 is installable from pkgsrc.

> The nice thing about kerberos now is that it builds on platforms with 
> minimal support.  The support libraries (com_err, ss) are bundled with 
> it - so you do not need to add anything else. You probably need perl, 
> shell, make and a C compiler...

I've always liked that (except for the com_err mess), but I've always expected that eventually the external dependencies would have to become more advanced.  It took us quite a while to start demanding C89 support, and after more than a decade we don't require C99.  Maybe it's time to add more dependencies or at least stop supporting some much older configurations (lack of threads, lack of IPv6, ancient Tcl versions for tests, etc).  Event loop code, without a built-in fallback?  I don't know... I suppose it depends on the portability of libevent or libev to less common or older platforms, and I'm not very well informed about that.

Ken