Brian Szymanski wrote:
Hmmm... Pardon my ignorance, as I'm new to qpsmtp hacking (as the
following will probably lay bare!) - would having the information in
%auth_mechanisms in a package variable result in that information
staying "cached" when the plugins are changed? If so, could that result
in unexpected behavior for some folks as they are changing auth plugins?
(Yeah, I'm green). Besides that, it sounds like a nicer way to do
things, and it could conceivably useful to have access to the info in
auth_mechanisms hash in the plugins themselves.
It isn't possible to change the plugins like that. If you are running a
long-running process (e.g. forkserver, prefork, or Apache), the only way
to change plugins is to restart the parent service. Any attribute
stored in the $self object (Qpsmtpd::Transaction or ::Connection) is
doubly slow (method dispatch plus hash dereference) to access, plus
there is the duplicated information in each object that is, essentially,
constant.
Incidentally, on the subject of auth methods, I was looking at adding
CRAM-SHA1 support in Auth.pm, but it seemed to me that the framework
CRAM-SHA1 is not, as far as I can tell, widely supported:
http://www.melnikov.ca/mel/devel/SASL_ServerRef.html
http://www.melnikov.ca/mel/devel/SASL_ClientRef.html
There's also the fact that the SHA-1 algorithm itself has been broken:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/cryptanalysis_o.html
Any particular reason you want to support it?
I also can't help but thinking that a method
with 7 arguments, at least 2 of which are optional, might be better
served with a hash. Anyone have ideas on what this "should" look like?
Most (all?) of the internal subs in Qpsmtpd use positional arguments
(being much faster), whereas many (most?) of the plugins seem to be
migrating towards named arguments (being much friendlier to the user).
I don't see any compelling reason to switch.
John
--
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite H
Lanham, MD 20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5748
