Re: [PATCH] IMAP authuser support
Thanks for your comments, Brendan. To address what you've said already:
* On 2005.05.11, in <20050512015051.GA412@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
* "Brendan Cully" <brendan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I believe this is the format defined in RFC 2595.
I see something similar, but not that exactly. I suspect/hope that
it's in an RFC, but it doesn't appear to be 2595. I'll keep looking --
perhaps it's in one of the more directly SASL-related RFCs, and 2595
uses what it has based on that precedent.
> I'm under a pretty severe time crunch right now, so I can't take a
> close look at the problem, but I have a feeling you're reinventing at
> least some of the wheel. Mutt already supports SASL, and SASL already
> supports authuser. You'd have a much smaller patch if you just added
> $imap_authuser and passed that along to the SASL library.
I might be missing something -- I haven't been able to use/look at
SASL very extensively -- but I thought it was necessary to support
SASL explicitly on both sides. If that's so, then to the best of my
knowledge I'm not looking at a SASL-capable server.
> I seem to recall that you'd prefer to avoid the extra dependency, but
> I think it's preferable to adding redundant code. Especially since,
> like the GSSAPI code, it's not going to be used in distributions and
> will probably ended up rotting on the vine.
> ...
> Of course, this is all an off-the-cuff opinion - if you've found
> problems with the SASL library I'd like to hear about them.
It's likely not broadly useful, true. But when you need authuser,
you need it in a mail client, and mutt is the choice of many mail
administrators.
I do dislike the SASL dependency (good memory; that was quite a while
ago). More importantly I've never been able to fully build any version
of SASL on any version of Solaris, and I've heard vaguely of other
people's portability problems with it, so I don't feel very alone. But
I might not have been batting it with a heavy enough brick, since I've
never *needed* to use it. I have a feeling it's not code, it's just
auto{make,conf} configuration madness.
Maybe GNU SASL is worth a try, too, although it perhaps doesn't share
Cyrus's API and it has a ugly pile of GNU dependencies if you want
extensive module support.
I suspect that one day I'll need to stop worrying and love SASL anyway.
I just don't like to see this difficulty as a requirement for my mutt
build, when I don't otherwise have any need of SASL at all and a small
amount of existing code can dodge the dependency.
--
-D. dgc@xxxxxxxxxxxx NSIT University of Chicago