Subject: auth-source-pass should not be limited to a local directory

From: Lorenzo Martinico <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2021 23:06:31 +0100

Apologies if this is not the appropriate mailing list for this message.
I would like to put in a bug report / feature request for
auth-source-pass to stop using the local file directory and just rely on
the output of the pass command (or provide an option to do that
instead).

For context, I would like to be able to use the pass command (or rather,
 an alias) to fetch files from a different host on every request, but
 not store the gpg files on my local machine. This workflow is currently
 not supported by auth-source-pass, as I need to specify a local
 directory from where to read a list of .gpg files. The behaviour I'd
 like to see is that the current parsing of the directory and .gpg files
 should be replaced with calling some equivalent functions from a pass
 binary, and parse the results. This is currently supported by the
 contrib password-store package, where the family of password-store--run
 functions does return the output from the pass command directly.
 However, that package is not suitable for building a complete solution,
 as many functions are not implemented or relay on auth-source-pass.

 I consider the above a high-impact bug, as smtpmail authentication
 requires auth-source, making email password storage quite restrictive.
 However, if there are some good reason for why the current behaviour
 should be kept, I would be happy to just hear any suggestion on how to
 adjust this through configuration, as I understand my usage for pass might
 not be very common.

Cheers,
Lorenzo Martinico