Re: feedback on AUTHINFO in qgnus-0.27

["Edward J. Sabol" <sabol@alderaan.gsfc.nasa.gov>]

Excerpts from mail: (20-Feb-98) Re: feedback on AUTHINFO in qgnus-0.27 by Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

"Edward J. Sabol" <sabol@alderaan.gsfc.nasa.gov> writes:
Ed> It sounds more complicated than it really is. Basically, if there's an entry
Ed> for the server in ~/.authinforc, then send authinfo for that server whether
Ed>> challenged or not.

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
Lars> Hm.  Some servers only challenge when entering certain groups.  The
Lars> user may wish to stick the machine name and the user name into the
Lars> file, but not the password, and it would be annoying if that would
Lars> lead Gnus to send the authinfo (and promt the user for that
Lars> unnecessary password) even if the user doesn't want to read the
Lars> password-protected groups.

Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no> writes:
Steinar> Does it matter if Gnus sends authinfo before it is challenged?

Lars> It is annoying to have to type a password unless it is really
Lars> required. 

Hmmmmm. Good point. I haven't had a chance to upgrade to the latest Quassia
yet, so forgive the question, but does the netrc parsing code you snarfed
from ange-ftp parse the macdefs (marco definitions)? If not, maybe it could
be modified to do so. So instead of semantically overloading the username as
you suggested, we could define a macro which could be used as a flag to
determine whether to force authinfo or not. For example,

machine news.foobar.com login baz password xyzzy
macdef nntp_init
force authinfo

Later,
Ed