[Mailman-Developers] Re: Future of pipermail?

[Bill Bumgarner]

How about PAM-- pluggable authentication modules?   It seems to have become
relatively standard on LInux and BSD and provides a flexible and portable API
that provides for versatile plug-n-play authentication across platforms.

I recently used it with Apache and ProFTPD to easily configure both to use the
same user/passwd database-- and neither to use the systems existing user/pass
system.

PAM modules exist for berkeley DB and MySQL, among various random standard
authentication procedures such as Kerberos and /etc/passwd.

It would not be hard to provide a module that makes the system accessible from
Python and the applicability would range a lot further than Mailman [make it
immediately attractive to others]. 

(It may be the case that a PAM python module already exists?  Haven't looked...)

Even if the implementation is not appropriate, the architecture is certainly
interesting and will likely contain ideas that are pertinent to building such an
authentication system as Chuq described.

b.bum