GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 531006
./configure fails without PAM
Last modified: 2010-06-04 20:48:52 UTC
Please describe the problem: I'm trying to build gdm-2.22.0 on a Slackware 12.0 system, but ./configure fails because of missing PAM headers and libraries. Slackware simply doesn't ship any PAM related stuff, and that's rather unlikely to ever change AFAIK. Does that mean I'm now stuck with gdm-2.20.x forever? Steps to reproduce: 1. find a Slackware system or any other *NIX system without PAM 2. unpack gdm-2.22.0 sources 3. run ./configure Actual results: $ ./configure [...] checking for pam_start in -lpam... no configure: error: "PAM libraries not found" $ Expected results: GDM should configure and build normally even without PAM, as it was the case with previous versions. Does this happen every time? Yup. Other information:
The new GDM only has a backend for PAM. If someone writes another good quality backend I'm sure we'd accept it.
While gdm-2.22.x works fine without PAM now, the same problem shows up once again in gdm-2.24.0 ... ./configure fails, even though I specified "--enable-authentication-scheme=shadow" (which doesn't seem to do a whole lot, unfortunately, other then setting a variable in configure which in turn isn't used again anywhere).
I don't believe that last statement is true. GDM 2.20 was the last version of GDM to support building/running without PAM. GDM 2.22 and later requires PAM. As Jon says, someone needs to write a quality backend for crypt/shadow backends. The code already exists in the old GDM so shouldn't be too hard to port for people who need Slackware or other distros that don't support PAM.
You're right - I was pretty sure I was running 2.22.x, but in fact I'm still running gdm-2.20.8. Sorry for the noise! :-)
*** Bug 554089 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
We depend on PAM.