Issue 36997: Document that spwd is considered harmful (original) (raw)

On BSD, Linux, and macOS, account and credential verification must go through PAM.

At least the part about Linux is not entirely true. If PAM is installed and used, then account and credential verification should probably go through PAM, but system administrator is free to decide to not install PAM at all.

Perhaps some Linux distributions like Red Hat and Fedora do not support PAM-free systems, but Gentoo certainly supports PAM-free systems (support for PAM is enabled by default in Gentoo, but is not enforced).