On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, Reuben Thomas wrote:
Yet this feature is turned on in PC-PINE (and presumably PC-ALPINE).
PC Alpine no longer uses a passfile. It uses the Windows mechanism to
store credentials. [And there was great rejoicing in the land...]
Maybe the best solution would
be for Pine to be compatible with more secure methods for keeping passwords
in user accounts (I'm thinking of keyring schemes)
We agree. We already do this for Mac OS X and Windows. We would
certainly appreciate information on how to do this on Linux.
Hopefully there is One True Way for keyringing on Linux. Even better
would be if the Linux guys, BSD guys, SVR4 guys, and the Mac OS X guys
could agree upon that One True Way (as more or less happened with PAM)
for all UNIX-like operating systems.
but making the option
compile-time only, and not even putting it commented out in the relevant
header file (at least, last time I checked) looks like peevishness or dogma.
It's neither. The PASSFILE feature was initially Windows-only, and only
at a user request did we allow the option to compile it into UNIX. We
never intended that this would be part of the UNIX function set; and we
certainly would never turn this on on our UNIX systems.
The capability to build UNIX Alpine that way exists, but we don't use it.
I'm sure that there are hackers out there who would love to get ahold of my
PASSFILE if I was ever foolish enough to keep one.
Sounds like you're foolish enough not to have good password discipline, then!
Someone who got their hands on my PASSFILE would get access to my mail
account, nothing more.
Non-sequitor. The PASSFILE only has "mail accounts"; but you are making
the (unwise) assumption that a "mail account" is never the same as a
"shell account". Some systems provide the facility of separate passwords
for "mail accounts" vs. other types of accounts; others do not.
Anyway, none of this matters much in the context of packaging for Debian,
where a patch is simply applied.
As long as it's documented as a being a Debian patch and not in our
distribution... ;-)
-- Mark --
http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
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