Hello Emacs developers,

Please, find attached ‘tramp-auto-auth.el’.  Quoting from its commentary
header section:

  This library provides ‘tramp-auto-auth-mode’: a global minor mode
  whose purpose is to automatically feed TRAMP sub-processes with
  passwords for paths matching regexps.  This is useful in situations
  where interactive user input is not desirable or feasible.  For
  instance, in sub-nets with large number of hosts or whose hosts have
  dynamic IPs assigned to them.  In those cases it’s not practical to
  query passwords using the ‘auth-source’ library, since this would
  require each host to be listed explicitly and immutably in a Netrc
  file.  Another scenario where this mode is useful are non-interactive
  Emacs sessions (like those used for batch processing or by evaluating
  ‘:async’ Org Babel source blocks) in which it’s impossible for the
  user to answer a password-asking prompt.

This library has proved extremely useful for my work using Emacs to
access remote machines in the aforementioned conditions and whose
authentication policies I couldn’t change.  For quite some time, I’ve
searched extensively for ways of accomplishing the same task with a
practical setup, to no avail.  Perhaps you could comment on alternative
approaches you had experience with but I failed to contemplate.

I’d like to discuss this implementation’s deficiencies and get your
insights and perspectives onto the problem this code is supposed to
solve.  I also would like to discuss how equivalent functionality could
make its way to the standard distribution, in case other people find it
useful enough to be worth supporting out-of-the-box.


Thanks in advance,
Bruno