On Mar 16,  8:40pm, dustin sallings wrote:
} 
} 	What about some actual changes:
} 
} 	PAM support[0]?

     This is something that I think would be useful.  Currently,
Solaris, HP-UX, various Linux distributions, and FreeBSD(?) all have
it.  Also many third party applications that need to do authentication
have support for it.  It seems that PAM is rapidly becoming a standard
used by most versions (installed copies) of UNIX and supported by a
wide variety of applications, so it would be something useful to have.
I just hope the implementation is clean and complete, as is the
tradition for NetBSD.  I've had a lot of trouble with a different
implementation where there was shoddy release engineering.

} 	Replacing rc with a modular system like rc.d[1]?

     This is something I wouldn't like to see.  All it does is change
the granularity of the config files.  There have been many times where
I've had to edit the files in init.d to get the exact effect I wanted.
At that point, there is no advantage to that kind of system.  In fact,
it's a disadvantage, since you have to hunt around for the place that
you need to make a change.  Also, the idea of playing with symbolic
links to configure your system isn't nice.  Personally, I think
NetBSD's, /etc/rc.conf is much nicer.

     The only good argument, I've heard for this system is that it
makes it easy for automated installation scripts to add things to the
system startup (I'm not sure that this is a good thing).  We could
easily get this advantage by creating a single /etc/rc.d directory and
having /etc/rc execute everything in it just before going multiuser
(controlled by a configuration variable in /etc/rc.conf).

}-- End of excerpt from dustin sallings