Kerberos for Palm V5

[Ken Raeburn]

On Oct 23, 2007, at 16:10, Sam Hartman wrote:
>>>>>> "Jackson," == Jackson, Michael <mike.jackson at janam.com> writes:
>
>     Jackson,> I'm looking for Kerberos support on Palm operating
>     Jackson,> system.  _______________________________________________
>
>
> Ken Raeburn has done some initial investigation of what it would take
> to do this.  However we never produced a release.

Not even close....

 From the point of view of someone porting UNIX code, I found the  
build environments for Palm (specifically, for 68k, theoretically to  
run on my old Handspring, so no ARM support; and this was several  
years ago) awkward to deal with, with different issues depending on  
which tools you want to use.  (I mostly worked with the GNU tools I  
found, because I'm familiar with them, though I experimented with  
CodeWarrior a little.)  Gratuitous header file and API differences  
from UNIX/POSIX, conflicting declarations in headers, stuff like  
that.  Okay, to be fair, it *isn't* UNIX by any stretch of the  
imagination.  And for someone writing new Palm code from scratch  
instead of porting UNIX code, it would probably be okay.

The limitations on individual code segment sizes was pretty  
frustrating, perhaps the most annoying part.  For an environment like  
that, I can appreciate wanting to be able to exercise fine control  
over allocations of code to segments.  *Having* to exercise such  
control, on the other hand, seems like a waste of my time.  And  
worse, it appeared (at least with GCC) that I had to update all the  
krb5 header files as well to indicate what functions would go in what  
segments; I don't see any way all of that could get back into our  
main sources cleanly.  I don't recall if there were restrictions on  
library data size as well.  I think I got as far as compiling some  
bits of library code; never got anything actually loaded onto a real  
device.

I hope things have improved in the development environments since  
then.  Perhaps the CW environment is better than the GNU one, and I  
just didn't spend enough time with it.

Now, that all said, I did find a few places I could tweak our code to  
bring the code size down, and some of those changes did get checked  
in.  The basic krb5 package is still pretty large for a Palm device,  
but I'm sure more work could be done.  And if you just want to build  
a single Kerberos app instead of a generic Kerberos library  
installation that can support every possible krb5 app, you may be  
able to let the linker eliminate the library functions your app  
doesn't use.

If you're a Palm developer and willing to tackle some of these  
things, I'd be happy to try to help you get something working.

Ken