On Mon, 15 Nov 2010 17:03:30 +0100 Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de> wrote: 

MA> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
>> OK, final revision I hope...  Note all backends will just throw an error
>> rather than changing the return value when creation fails.  I think
>> that's the least surprising behavior.

MA> I'm OK with this. The auth-sources info pages might show some examples,
MA> though.

Attached is a version of auth-source.el I finally did over the weekend
that implements:

1) defclass auth-source-backend (using eioio) which gives us a lot of
flexibility, including the ability to let users customize the backends
directly.

2) accepts auth-sources in the format '("~/.authinfo.gpg" "~/.authinfo")
and the other ones that Customize can produce through the function
auth-source-backend-parse

3) auth-source-search (the documentation is mostly unchanged, except for
"You probably want at least a :secret property if you specify
:create.").  It returns early if :max is set.

4) netrc backend: auth-source-netrc-parse, auth-source-netrc-normalize,
auth-source-netrc-search; not done: auth-source-netrc-create.  This
removes the dependency on netrc.el and simplifies things a bit.  Note
the alist-to-plist rewrite and key aliasing are done in
auth-source-netrc-normalize.  I didn't want to rewrite
auth-source-netrc-parse too much from the starting point of
netrc-parse.  Also note the :secret key is a function now and clients
have to expect that.  I think that's a good thing.

Everything after 

;;; older API

is unchanged from before and will probably be rewritten.

Look it over and let me know what you think.  I'm still not sure how the
creation should work exactly and hope you will tell me how the rewrite
"feels," especially considered against the Secrets API.

Ted