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

[Ben Key <bkey76@gmail.com>]

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On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 6:09 AM, Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>wrote:

secrets.el was initiated as implementation of D-Bus'
> org.freedesktop.secrets interface. Does there exist a a server under OS
> X for that? I know the Gnome (keyring) and KDE (kwallet) implementations
> so far, a short search does not return results for OS X.
>
> The functions in secrets.el are designed to give simple access to that
> interface.
>
>
First, to give a little background.  Several months ago there was a request
to have auth-source.el use the Mac OS X keychain functions (see
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2011-03/msg00486.html).  These
functions are documented at
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Security/Conceptual/keychainServConcepts/03tasks/tasks.html.
I agreed to do it but then got busy and later forgot about it.  I want to
finally keep my promise this weekend.

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.

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 am willing to be over ruled though.

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.

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