Re: making smb remember passwords

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Ken,

On Wed, 2003-04-16 at 23:26, Ken Deeter wrote:
> why not gconf keys?

	Gconf keys are persisted to disk unpredictably; and one should never
persist a password to disk; even passing it around freely between apps
is risky IMHO.

> Why do we want to do this at the application level? It seems like an app
> shouldn't have to care about whether its getting a file from the local
> system or a remote system.. so it should just be able to say:

	gnome-vfs isn't at the application level ;-) the daemon would hide all
of that; except the application will still need to provide
authentication input hooks.

> I also wonder why the authentication is done through a call back.. or i
> guess it seems there should be a default call back already that
> implements a password dialog so that every app doesn't have to write
> one. 

	There is no UI part of gnome-vfs; quite why we can't put this
functionality into libgnomeui I have no idea - it probably has more to
do with broken political ideologies ("libgnomeui must die") rather than
pragmatic sanity. You're certainly right though - libgnomeui, or
libbonoboui should provide a default password / auth dialog that the
user doesn't need to care about.

	Perhaps a problem with that is that overriding a system callback is
slightly problematic, the push_callback / pop_callback stuff does
precisely not what it's name implies; it should be clobber_callback,
etc. ;-)

	HTH,

		Michael.