bug#58985: 29.0.50; Gnus setup broken by commit 2cf9e699ef0fc43a4eadaf00a1ed2f876765c64d

[J.P.]

Hi João,

João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Maintainers,
>
> Commit 2cf9e699ef0fc43a4eadaf00a1ed2f876765c64d breaks my Gnus setup.
>
>     Author: F. Jason Park <jp@neverwas.me>
>     Date:   Tue Nov 1 22:46:24 2022 -0700
>
>     Make auth-source-pass behave more like other backends
>
> I've reached this conclusion through 'git bisect'.  I.e. the commit which
> immediately precedes it is not broken.

Sorry about that. I feel not great that you spent precious man hours
bisecting on my account.

The new option `auth-source-pass-extra-query-params' is behind the
breakage you're witnessing. It tries to make auth-source-pass adhere as
closely as possible ("bug for bug") to the auth-source reference
backend, netrc (but only to the extent that the other backends already
do). The idea was to make searches closer to being backend agnostic and
thus more predictable. And auth-source-pass was the lone holdout in
terms of conforming behavior. But, alas, it's looking like the quest for
uniformity has come at the cost of usability for everyday
auth-source-pass users, which is regrettable and surely a deal breaker
for keeping it enabled by default.

> I haven't investigated why, but I do use 'pass' (www.passwordstore.org) to
>   (require 'auth-source)
>   (auth-source-pass-enable)
>   (setq auth-sources '(password-store)) ;; don't use anything else
>
> store my passwords securely.
>
> This is my pass-related setup, which is pretty simple:
>
> After the commit, M-x gnus is unable to connect to my local imap server.  
> There
> is very little debug information.

If we were actually gonna try and debug this, I'd probably ask you for
the names of the affected items in your ~/.password-store and the query
params passed to `auth-source-search' and maybe also whatever's printed
to *Messages* when a query is performed with `auth-source-debug' turned
on.

However, I think it's probably best to forgo all that and do what I was
leaning toward from the outset, and that's keeping the new behavior off
by default in Emacs 29. It's looking liable to cause too much churn for
too many folks [1]. Thus, unless anyone objects or has anything else to
add, I will do this in the next 24 hours or so. Apologies again for the
disruption and the time spent bisecting.

J.P.


[1] https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=58985#114