Re: Modifying Emacs to use the Mac OS X Keychain Services

[Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>]

Ben Key <bkey76@gmail.com> writes:

Hi Ben,

> When I started looking into what would be needed to complete this task
> the first thing I noticed is that auth-source.el makes use of the
> functions in secrets.el I mentioned if the user customizes the
> auth-sources variable to include the secrets API.  Since the Keychain
> Services API provides functionality similar to that provided by the
> org.freedesktop.secrets interface I figured that secrets.el would be a
> logical place to put the change.  Putting the code there also makes it
> available to packages other than Gnus.  Of course I could just define
> another authentication source in auth-source.el as you suggest.

auth-source.el is not used by Gnus only. For example, Tramp uses it as
well instead of secrets.el, although I'm the maintainer of Tramp and the
author of secrets.el :-)

And the intention is, that auth-source.el shall be *the* authentication
library to be used by other Emacs packages.

> I thought that extending secrets.el was the more logical choice since
> much like the org.freedesktop.secrets interface, the Keychain Services
> API provides a Login key chain along with the possibility of using an
> application defined keychain.

I fear a little bit about differences between Secrets Services API and
the Keychain Services API - secrets.el will follow the Secrets Service
API whenever there is a change. And I suspect there is not so much code
of secrets.el for reuse with Keychain Service API.

I'm not using OS X, could you, please, send me a pointer to the Keychain
Services API?

> Which approach should I take?  Whichever approach I take, I may need
> some help writing the Lisp code necessary for my change.  While I know
> enough Lisp to perform simple tasks, I am definitely NOT a Lisp
> programmer.

I'm pretty sure, people will help you. Including myself, although I'm
not as responsible as I would like due to other duties.

Best regards, Michael.