Re: auth-source multiple accounts

[Uday S Reddy]

On 7/27/2010 6:59 PM, Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> I want to make it more generic with QUERIES since not every auth-source
> API user will want the login ID to be a query key.  VM and Gnus have
> this kind of data hierarchy but url*.el doesn't, for example.  I think
> that's a good compromise and doesn't extend the API too much.
>
>  From VM you would pass me (k v) as the query, e.g. (login "xyz").  In
> the netrc/authinfo file, then, I would match only lines with
>
> .... login xyz ....
>
> in them.  So the query key and value are a contract between the
> application and the user.  auth-source is just a conduit.  If VM
> standardizes on (login "xyz") then we'll add a VM-specific section to
> the auth.texi manual giving an example.  For Gnus we'll probably use
> (server "xyz") because the Gnus configuration hierarchy is structured
> that way.

Hi Ted, I am entirely in support of the general queries feature. as long it 
includes login-queries.

However, there is another problem.  (Sorry to be bringing up so many problems:-(

I suppose auth-source is part of the Gnus distribution.  Am I right?  So, 
people are going to be using different versions of auth-source, obtained via 
the Gnus distribution, FSF distribution and XEmacs distribution (not to mention 
other independent distros).  It will take years for all of these distributions 
to converge.

So, I won't be able to use the new version of auth-source-user-or-password in 
VM until I can be sure that all our users have retired the old version.  Sounds 
terrible, doesn't it?  When we deal with independent distributions, it appears 
that backward-compatibility is not enough; forward-compatibility is also needed.

One solution is to add a new function instead of adding an optional parameter 
to the existing function.  Then I can test to see if the new function exists 
and use the querying functionality if it does.

Cheers,
Uday