Authconfig Cleanup

Summary

Removal of obsolete and unmaintainable code from Authconfig such as the support for configuring Hesiod and the authconfig GTK2 based GUI and TUI.

Owner

Name: Tomáš Mráz
Email: tmraz@redhat.com
Release notes owner:

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 26
Last updated: 2017-09-01
Tracker bug: #1406000

Detailed Description

There is plentiful of Authconfig code that is not really usable in the modern environment such as the support for WINS or Hesiod. Also the TUI and GUI of Authconfig is using unmaintained libraries such as GTK+2 and Glade. There are no resources to further develop these and port them to current GUI toolkits. The TUI was declared as deprecated a very long time ago. The current modern environments support autoconfiguration of the remote user identity and authentication via Realmd and SSSD and do not need any manual configuration through GUI. There is also an effort underway to develop a new tool for setup of PAM and NSSWITCH with better use of SSSD (called authselect - see Fedora Change and GitHub project). But we understand that some of the command line functionality of Authconfig might still be useful in some environments and also to support the Anaconda kickstart %auth command. To keep the Authconfig code maintainable in future (in a kind of legacy mode) we need to cut out the parts that are not maintainable anymore or just complicate the code without any real user benefit.

Benefit to Fedora

There will still be a command line tool to manually manipulate the PAM, NSSWITCH, Kerberos and LDAP configuration if needed which can be maintained in future.

Scope

Proposal owners: Cleanup the Authconfig code, release a new upstream version and import it to Fedora.

Other developers: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Release engineering: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
- List of deliverables: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Policies and guidelines: N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)