GNU bug report logs - #22081
24.5; netrc.el fails parsing authinfo items spread over multiple lines

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From: Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton <at> gmail.com>
To: 22081 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#22081: 24.5; netrc.el fails parsing authinfo items spread over multiple lines
Date: Fri, 04 Dec 2015 14:25:00 +0000

On Thu 03 Dec 2015, Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Dec 2015 11:20:29 +0100 Vasilij Schneidermann <v.schneidermann <at> gmail.com> wrote: 
>
> VS> A .netrc or .authinfo file typically contains the credentials for a
> VS> specific machine on a single line, but according to netrc(5)
> VS> <http://linux.die.net/man/5/netrc> it's allowed to use newlines between
> VS> the tokens as well.  Using (netrc-parse) leaves such items out which is
> VS> clearly an error in the implementation.
>
> The Emacs implementation in auth-source.el `auth-source-netrc-parse',
> which is used by default for netrc files today, is not a
> reimplementation of that semi-standard:
>
> * there is no RFC for the netrc format as far as I know
>
> * Emacs supports both single and double quotes around strings (note the
>   man page doesn't indicate how tokens are quoted!)
>
> * macdef and default are not explicitly supported
>
> * arbitrary keywords are supported
>
> * the "machine" keyword is not required for an entry
>
> The last two, especially, make it hard to support multi-line entries.
> Since there is no RFC to my knowledge and no functional need to spread
> entries across multiple lines, I'd like to close this as a WONTFIX. Any
> opinions?

RFCs describe wire-protocols and interchange data formats, so I would
not expect an RFC for this. The .netrc file format is from BSD UNIX.

Support for arbitrary keywords, and omission of the machine token mean
that emacs will parse a .netrc file that other programs reject as
ill-formed. That is unhelpful: either be compatible with other programs
that read .netrc, or define  a new file format with a different name.

    AndyM

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