Re: JAVA Support

On Sep 29, 2006, at 12:31 AM, Magnus Hagander wrote:

>>> However, that doesn't change that some people would like us to
>> support
>>> GSSAPI, and there may be some benefit (additional applications,
>> better
>>> network authentication, etc.) for doing so. If we can get
>> additional
>>> programmers to code the support (i.e. Sun, JPL) I don't see any
>> reason
>>> not to support the *additional* authentication methods.
>>
>> Well, as I said already, a lot depends on the size of the patch.
>> As a reductio ad absurdum, if they drop 100K lines of code on us,
>> it *will* get rejected, no matter how cool it is.
>
> Oh, absolutely.
>
>
>> The current Kerberos support seems to require about 50 lines in
>> configure.in and circa 200 lines of C code in each of the backend
>> and libpq. Plus a dependency on an outside library that happens to
>> be readily available and compatibly licensed.
>
> I would expect, without looking at the details of the API, GSSAPI
> to be
> about the same amount of code if not less.

Probably save some Kerberos bookkeeping. Probably loose it with
GSSAPI bookkeeping, including name translation (which is far less
obvious). Net, I would expect to lose, but not by very much.

>> What amount of code are we talking about adding here, and what
>> dependencies exactly? What portability and license hazards will be
>> added?
>
> The Kerberos5 libraries that we rely on today provide GSSAPI. So it
> would work with the same external library. Now, it could *also* work
> with other libraries in some cases (for example, the Win32 SSPI
> libraries), but with the same libraries it should work fine.
>
> //Magnus

If I had a lot of time to spend on this I would write a SASL-like
wrapper so it could be used on platforms with GSSAPI, but not SASL
support in the OS. As you may have noticed, I believe SASL is the
way to go. I'm not up for it though.

There's probably room in the world for a "SASL-lite" library though.
Cyrus is great, but if your OS doesn't supply it for you, it's
supposed to be really hard to build.

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The opinions expressed in this message are mine,
not those of Caltech, JPL, NASA, or the US Government.
Henry(dot)B(dot)Hotz(at)jpl(dot)nasa(dot)gov, or hbhotz(at)oxy(dot)edu