[Gnu-arch-users] ~/.authinfo mechanism (was Re: HTTP access to CVS)

[Matthieu Moy]

Dhruva Krishnamurthy <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 09:43:12 +0100, Matthieu Moy <address@hidden> said:
>
> mm> 
> http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/arch/public/tla/tla--authinfo/tla--authinfo--1.4/patch-1/tla--authinfo--1.4--patch-1.tar.gz
>
> mm> You should be able to get it with your web browser, this time.
>
> Thanks a ton, I downloaded it and am now compiling it. Can you give me a short
> description to use it? I am new to authinfo file format.

machine <your proxy> login <your login> password <your password>
machine <another machine> login <your login> password <your password>
machine <a third machine> login <your login> password <your password>

double quotes are allowed around machine, login and password, but are
not mandatory.

This is a convention used by several mailer/newsreaders. I couldn't
find a real spec for that.

Don't forget the chmod 600 ~/.authinfo, and be carefull with backup
files, off course.


Actually, there is still some work to make something clean :

1) write a clean spec of the file format

2) review the code and probably change things to adapt to tla's coding
   style.

3) move the code away from pfs-dav.c, make an independant
   authinfo.c/authinfo.h (I think a pure ANSI C version without
   dependancy + BSD-like license would be nice because reuseable
   outside tla).

4) Use this mechanism in other pfs backends. Storing the passwords in
   the archive location is anyway a bad idea. Who wants tla to display
   the passwords in clear text when one types "tla archive"?? There
   was some discussions about sharing the ~/.arch-params/ with arch
   itself. Err, I won't do that if I have clear text passwords in this
   directory ...

5) Actually, it would even be better to have a generic password
   storing mechanism that could use ~/.authinfo, kwallet, or whatever
   as a backend.

I'm not willing to do all that if the code has no chance to be merged
into the main branch. Since my posts about this have been mainly
ignored by developpers, I guess this is the case. (But I'd be happy to
change my mind)

-- 
Matthieu