bug#48598: Questions regarding auth-source integration (bug#48598)

["J.P." <jp@neverwas.me>]

Hi Damien,

Damien Cassou <damien@cassou.me> writes:

> if auth-source-pass doesn't implement auth-source protocol, shouldn't we
> try to improve it instead of working around it in all users of the
> library? Am I missing something?

Thanks for getting back to me. I have no idea what the protocol entails.
I blindly based the proposed sketch around the behavior I observed from
the netrc back end alone. But my impressions and expectations may have
been misguided and/or unreasonable because none of those disparities
(between netrc and pass) seems essential to basic everyday use.

That said, if there were an effort to further align pass with netrc in
those other respects, I certainly wouldn't protest. The one catch from
ERC's POV is that we'd have to find a way to offer a suitable
integration experience for the older versions we support, right now 27
and 28. To me, suitable means ideally identical.

What I'd like to do for now is to figure out how realistic the
expectations are that I'm placing on auth-source as a protocol, in case
we want to support more back ends in the future. We're staking a
permanent public interface on these expectations, so I'd like to be as
confident as is reasonably possible. If you'd like, I can try to
summarize those expectations to spare you from having to glean them from
the various snippets I referenced in that last email.

Thanks so much,
J.P.