Title says it all:

Not too excited yet! I don't think everything will be OK at first, but hope I'm wrong about what I feel about PAM.

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So it begins.

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People who don't want PAM better save this current ISO

Hopefully this will allow the major blockers to be cleared (hopefully bringing in Plasma5 and xfce 4.14) and get us on a quick road to a stable 15.0 release!

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Indeed

Will be interesting to see what, if anything, has changed since it hit testing/.

I would have preferred a more minimal module config out of the box, but judging by the comment in the changelog it looks like it's going to be a fully-loaded affair. I guess some people will be wanting that, and I'm just an outlier.

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Yeah, I'm not really sure that's practical as you're going to be dead-ended from further updates going forward.

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Yeah, I agree... but I imagine this is going to be divisive enough that some will want to try.

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I suspect some people will be upset by the change; I'm in it for the long haul. I'm looking forward to XFCE 4.14 and KDE-plasma.

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Maybe this is going to be divisive, but if someones tries in future to maintain a "divergent fork" of Slackware without PAM, from what I known, the required Slackware knowledge, skills and efforts are so high, that I do not see others than Mr. Hameleers or Darth Vader, able of doing it.

How the first one looks being quite happy with a PAMified Slackware, and the second one likely does not bother anymore (and in the past he was a fervent fan of PAM in Slackware), I do not believe that there would be that "divergent fork"

So, that "divisive" thing would be likely limited to some furious barking and some melodramatic "I quit!" threads...

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You have a lot of faith in this person. Who knows if Darth Vader has kept up with what it takes to maintain a distro over the years.

But at the same time, do you know what it takes to maintain a distro? I don't. So it could be much harder than I expect or it could be much easier than I expect. PAM was holding Pat back from moving the distro to where he wanted it. It is obvious with Eric's work that Plasma5 does not need PAM, and all the packages in -current now can obviously function without PAM, so would it really be that hard to maintain a fork? Sure, if some updates of programs end up with hard requirements on PAM, then you might run into issues, but it seems like the non-PAM support works fine. Many on this forum are already upgrading their software beyond what Pat has in -current. Some are compiling right out of git versions, so I wouldn't be surprised if others are very capable of maintaining their own fork.

To top it off, we've seen a lot of divergent forks of Slackware over the years (including Dlackware which incorporates systemd and Gnome3), so if someone decides to push for it, who's to say they can't accomplish it?

All this being said, I'm not dismissing what Pat does... because simply maintaining a distro vs having the consistent level of quality seen in Slackware releases are two very different things. It's typically easy to upgrade packages, what's hard is to upgrade packages and keep system stability... and we've seen this successfully done year after year, decade after decade (Slackware is 26 years old!).

All this being said, I have no issues with PAM right now, but I'm also not using it. My desktop runs 14.2 and my htpc runs a -current install from May 2019. When 15.0 comes out, I will be happily upgrading both to 15.0 and I hope that PAM won't affect my ability to maintain my machine (and I'm not expecting anything serious since Pat does amazing work).

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It was nice of Pat to give us the heads up.
I'm one of those intending to do this exact thing.
It's neither practical, nor impractical. I'll just keep it in my back pocket... next to my Slackware 7.0 CDs. I'm not going to try and run or maintain it.

Esther Lederer, better known as advice columnist Ann Landers, wrote: "Women complain about sex more often than men. Their gripes fall into two categories: (1) Note enough (2) Too much".

The same can be said of LQ posters about systemd, PAM, PulseAudio, GRUB, udev, automatic dependency resolution, UEFI, what else? Maybe someone will step in stating "I'll go back to Slackware when it will have pam_systemd"

When offered a new toy, the best we can do is learn how to play with it. This could be a good start.

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So what's going to be needed on the user's end when the change happens? life as usual? Anything to keep in mind so we're not locked out after the first reboot? Or is PAM not that way anymore?

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Probably, you have just to avoid to mess with the files from "/etc/pam.d" if you want to live peacefully. Apparently the best way is: ignore it and it will not bother you.

After all, until now there is someone who had problems with Kerberos, which is famous of biting even the root's hand?