openssh unix dev - Mar 2005 - Dynamic smartcard support?

Hi all, and thanks for everyone's work on the 4.0 release!

There's been recent discussion on the OpenSC mailing list about
getting better/updated smartcard support into OpenSSH.

Originating from an OpenSSH package maintainer's desire to keep
dependencies to a minimum, the idea to load OpenSC dynamically
popped up. Now the question is whether this is an approach that
would be favored by the OpenSSH maintainers?

Do all of the portable platforms even support dynamic loading?


//Peter

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 11, 2005 at 08:09:39AM +0100, Peter Stuge
wrote:
> Originating from an OpenSSH package maintainer's desire to keep
> dependencies to a minimum, the idea to load OpenSC dynamically
> popped up. Now the question is whether this is an approach that
> would be favored by the OpenSSH maintainers?
I'm not an OpenSSH maintainer, but this sounds to me as "even more
dependencies" - portable shared libraries are *hard*, and you'd still
need to have all the calls to OpenSC functions in the OpenSSH code base.

gert
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Peter Stuge wrote:
> There's been recent discussion on the OpenSC mailing list about
> getting better/updated smartcard support into OpenSSH.
> 
> Originating from an OpenSSH package maintainer's desire to keep
> dependencies to a minimum, the idea to load OpenSC dynamically
> popped up.
That is this thread?
http://www.opensc.org/pipermail/opensc-devel/2005-March/005707.html
> Now the question is whether this is an approach that
> would be favored by the OpenSSH maintainers?
This has been suggested once before (dlopen'ing a library for 
KerberosGetAFSToken) but there was not much support for it.  I suspect 
there would not be much support for this either.
> Do all of the portable platforms even support dynamic loading?
I don't think Cygwin does.  There could well be others.

Even on platforms where it is supported it's likely to vary quite a bit. 
On AIX, libfoo.a can contain shared and static components.  On HP-UX, the 
libraries are libfoo.sl not libfoo.so.  dlopen can be hiding in different 
places on different platforms.  And probably many other things...

-- 
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