On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, jas@extundo.com wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Ted Zlatanov wrote:
> 
>> Should I extract that to authinfo.el (or netrc.el?)  so it can be
>> integrated with smtpmail.el?
> 
> I think that would be a good idea.  nntp.el, imap.el and sieve.el
> would also need to be changed, and maybe more stuff.

I am attaching the netrc.el file, and the patch to gnus-util.el that
will provide backward compatibility (via defalias calls) until the
maintainers of the respective modules want to move to the netrc
function names.

I had to do

(eval-and-compile
  (defalias 'netrc-point-at-eol
    (if (fboundp 'point-at-eol)
	'point-at-eol
      'line-end-position)))

instead of 

(defalias 'netrc-point-at-eol
  (if (fboundp 'point-at-eol)
      'point-at-eol
    'line-end-position))

I'm not sure why the compilation was having problems with the
function without the eval-and-compile...  The rest was very easy
though.

>> Also smtpmail.el needs to be patched so it accepts the old-style
>> flat lists and the gnus-parse-netrc style output.
> 
> I think it would be better if smtpmail.el looked in .authinfo by
> default, and not touch the `smtpmail-auth-credentials' stuff.

When I know that the netrc.el functionality is accepted, I will try to
modify smtpmail.el further to work with the netrc interface.
smtpmail.el ships with Emacs, while netrc.el does not (yet?), so it
doesn't make sense to modify smtpmail.el to rely on the netrc
functionality only.  It should look for netrc first, and failing that
it should try the smtpmail-auth-credentials.  I would appreciate
comments from Stephen Cranefield, who's noted in the smtpmail.el
credits as the AUTH support author.  It would also be good to know the
chances of having netrc.el included in the main Emacs distro.

Thanks
Ted