2026-09-29 12:19 UTC
@ska@social.treehouse.systems
This is a well-known area of conflict between #PAM and application architectures, not just #OpenSSH but GUI login programs too.
I've got a TUI PAM-using app that does WIMP-like things, and it presents the #OpenPAM "conversation" as a series of modal (text-mode) dialogue boxes; and that's really the only way that PAM lets applications, GUI or TUI, work with it.
Whether GUI or TUI, modal dialogues operate by having an inner, secondary, UI event loop, and that's sometimes a problem.
Replies (1)
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@JdeBP@tty0.social 2026-09-29 12:34
@ska@social.treehouse.systems I'm lucky in that login-envuidgid does not do more complex UI things than present a continually ticking clock, so an event loop inside the pam_conv callback is not a problem. But a more complex application might want to have more than just a modal dialogue on screen, but instead have lots of UI events going to different UI elements; and something like a login server over SSH is doing the whole SSH conversation in parallel, too, likewise a complex event-driven system. #PAM #OpenPAM