Re: auth-sources asking for password 2 or 3 times

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2011 21:25:57 +0900 Daiki Ueno <ueno@unixuser.org> wrote: 

DU> Do you mean it is not feasible to change the format anymore?  Though I'm
DU> not familiar with the history of the netrc format, I was thinking of the
DU> following extension introducing a new keyword "credential", which takes
DU> an ID associated with a password along with hidden attributes:

DU> $ cat ~/.authinfo # plain text
DU> machine example.org credential my-home-imap port imap

DU> $ gpg < ~/.secrets.org.gpg
DU> |--------------+----------+------------|
DU> | id           | password | attributes |
DU> |--------------+----------+------------|
DU> | my-home-imap | PaSSwoRd | user=foo   |
DU> |--------------+----------+------------|

DU> If an entry in ~/.authinfo has neither "login", "password", nor
DU> "credential", Gnus could consider the entry password-less and would not
DU> try to decrypt ~/.secrets.org.gpg.

DU> I think there will be no compatibility issue, except the netrc format
DU> extension.  If a user want to try this new feature, he could just
DU> customize auth-sources so that it points to ~/.authinfo instead of
DU> ~/.authinfo.gpg.

Yes, this could certainly be workable.  Could the line be:

machine example.org port imap credential my-home-imap credential-file "~/.secrets.org.gpg"

so that a) the netrc file can hold many such pointers, and b) we don't
have to change the file name spec to "fileA+fileB" as I proposed?

It's a little more verbose but IMO that's not a big deal in a small file
like netrc.  It's also backwards compatible so the users don't have to
change their existing auth-sources or their authinfo/netrc files.

Ted