Various patches

On this page, I present various patches that I've made for various open source programs. Maybe you, too, will find one that is to your liking.

Screen and Kerberos

Since I'm using Kerberos at home and am a heavy user of GNU Screen, I've experience a couple of problems with the integration, or rather lack of integration, between Kerberos and Screen:

• When one logs into a Kerberos-enabled system, one gets a TGT, which is stored in a credential cache (usually located in /tmp on UNIX systems). This credential cache also contains all subsequent Kerberos tickets that one is granted. When one logs out from the system again, that credential cache is, naturally, removed. This causes a problem with screen, since one might have started a screen session, that uses that credential cache, and then detached it. When one then logs out from the system and the credential cache is removed, the screen session and all processes running in it are left without any tickets.
• One may want to start a couple of processes running in a screen session, and then detach that screen and let them continue doing their job, without manual intervention. Since Kerberos tickets expire after a while, this is not possible without manually logging in and renewing them, however.

In the light of this, I made a patch for Screen that fixes these problems. It makes a copy of the credential cache when it starts up, deletes it when the screen session is terminated, and renews the tickets when it deems it fitting (providing, of course, that the tickets are renewable).

Note that this patch requires either MIT Kerberos or a compatible API (Heimdal might work, but I have not tried).

Three patches are available:

screen-krb-noconf.diff

This patch makes all the necessary changes to Screen, but does not update the configure script, so it needs to be regenerated with autoconf after the patch has been applied. This is the recommended patch.

screen-krb.diff

This patch is like the above, but also includes the new configure script, as generated by autoconf 2.57. I would recommend using this patch only if you do not have autoconf installed on your system.

screen-krb-ebuild.diff

This patch updates the screen ebuild on Gentoo Linux systems. Put the screen-krb-noconf.diff patch in the files subdirectory of the screen ebuild directory, apply this patch to the ebuild, and you can emerge screen as you normally would.

Gaim Spellchecking Language Setting

Although I live in Sweden, I always use English on all my systems, since, although all the free translation projects around the world do a great job, it is still clear to me that English is the native language for the majority of free software today – it just works best in English. Even so, when I use Gaim to chat with my Swedish friends, I naturally do so in Swedish. However, when Gaim is compiled with gtkspell support, it always spellchecks in the same language as the current locale, which leads to a very annoying situation.

Therefore, I wrote this patch that allows me to change a setting in my Gaim preferences file to change the language in which Gaim spellchecks, without having to run Gaim in a Swedish locale. To use, apply the patch below, and change/add the /gaim/gtk/conversations/spellcheck_lang in your ~/.gaim/prefs.xml file.

gaim-spellcheck-lang.patch

Apply this in the src subdirectory of the Gaim source distribution to be able to change the spellchecking language.

Subnet propagation for rwho data

I use rwho at home, mostly for fun. I also have two seperate subnets. Since these two conditions are incompatible, I had to write a patch to rectify the situation. Patching the standard netkit rwhod with this patch allows one to run rwhod -r on the router between two subnets, to make rwhod propagate the rwho data between the subnets.

rwhod-subnet.diff

Apply this patch to the netkit rwho source distribution to add the rwho data routing option to rwhod.

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