retitle 92353 ITA: pam -- Pluggable Authentication Modules thanks
Hi. I believe I could probably give PAM a good home. I'm a new Debian developer--only joined the project in December. However, I have significant free software experience going back to work on Kerberos starting in 1994. Most of my interest is in security software and in making security/single sign on/system administration easier. My company, Mekinok (http://www.mekinok.com/) hopes to work on various free-software IT infrastructure projects. Making sure PAM works within Debian is certainly something we care about and is something I could spend time working on. I'm fairly familiar with PAM; I maintain two pam modules already (libpam-krb5 and libpam-openafs-session) and am fairly familiar with how it works. I'm not a PAM developer; if someone else has inside connections both with PAM and with Debian they might be better than I. However, I'm a good designer, I have a good feel for packaging and integration issues both within Debian and with other OSes, so I'd likely make a good maintainer. The main issue I'm concerned about is dbs. I don't have much experience with it. I understand the idea, but it seems like it is hard to manage dbs while also trying to do revision control on my changes. I'm much more used to using cvs-buildpackage. However, I recognize that dbs provides better tracking of the separation of Debian changes from the upstream sources. I'll give using it a fair chance and learn to either like or hate it from an informed standpoint. If I decide I don't like it, I will only change after I'm firmly certain that I've given it a good chance and that I'm doing a good job mainting the PAM package and would like to continue. Making significant changes to the package and then orphaning it is not something I will do.
