Re: feedback on AUTHINFO in qgnus-0.27

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

Excerpts from mail: (21-Feb-98) Re: feedback on AUTHINFO in qgnus-0.27 by Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
"Edward J. Sabol" <sabol@alderaan.gsfc.nasa.gov> writes:
Ed> So instead of semantically overloading the username as
Ed> you suggested, we could define a macro which could be used as a flag to
Ed> determine whether to force authinfo or not. For example,
Ed> 
Ed> machine news.foobar.com login baz password xyzzy
Ed> macdef nntp_init
Ed> force authinfo

Lars> Well, how would the user specify that authinfo should be forced onto
Lars> server news.foobar.com and not news.barfoo.com?

Since the "macdef" comes after "machine news.foobar.com", it only applies to
that host and not to any other. That's completely consistent with the way FTP
parses the ~/.netrc file and uses the "init" macro (and any others you define
for a given host). In other words, the macros are defined on a per-host
basis. To answer your question specifically, here is how you do it:

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

machine news.barfoo.com login zab password yzzyx
------------------

This method retains maximum compatibility with ~/.netrc to the point where
you can still use the same file for both (assuming usernames and passwords
are the same for NNTP and for login, of course). (If you implement this,
please note that multiple macros other than "nntp_init" may be defined for a
given host, but Gnus should only concern itself with the "nntp_init" macro.)

Later,
Ed