pam(7) says "For more information the reader is directed to the
Linux-PAM system administrators' guide," and later, under "SEE
ALSO", it says "The three Linux-PAM" guides. But nowhere in that
page does it suggest where one might obtain such a guide. The
/usr/share/doc/libpam-runtime directory is even more unhelpful.
If you search the descriptions of packages in the Debian archives for
"Linux-PAM" and/or "guide", the package libpam-doc does not show up in
the results.
And even if you're looking straight at the description for the
libpam-doc package, it does not say anything like "contains
Linux-PAM Guides for System administrators". Just reading this
package description for the "documentation for the Pluggable
Authentication Modules library", I would assume it was another
library development doc, like libgtk1.2-doc is.
Now, I've been looking at doc/libpam-runtime, because this is the
package which provides pam(7), pam.d(8), as well as /etc/pam.conf and
the /etc/pam.d/ directory itself. If you, for some strange reason,
decide to look at the doc directory for the package which provides
/lib/libpam-gobbledigook-number-numer.so, *then* you finally find in
README.Debian that the knowledge you seek is in another package 600kb
package, libpam-doc.
I know you don't want to bloat the size of required packages, but
pam.txt.gz is only 40k. This stuff is important for security, so
*please* don't make this information difficult to find.
Thank you,
- Kevin Turner