Comment # 5 on bug 943474 from Thorsten Kukuk

(In reply to Daniel Pecka from comment #0)
> Some sysadmins prefer to have trainwrecks under theirs control and modify
> these files manually. Yast also at certain situation might trigger
> refreshing these pam.d/ files which results, in lost configurations made by
> hand ..

for i in common-account /etc/pam.d/common-auth /etc/pam.d/common-password
/etc/pam.d/common-session; do
rm /etc/pam.d/$i
cp /etc/pam.d/$i-pc /etc/pam.d/$i
done

Now you can modify the common-* (without -pc) files and pam-config will not
overwrite them. And you can look into the -pc files, which changes pam-config
would have made, and port them to your modified files.