Subject: Re: bug#7487: 24.0.50; Gnus nnimap broken

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:32:20 -0500

>> It seems gnus-agent (which I never explicitly enabled, but have had
>> problems with in past upgrades after it was enabled by default) is out
>> of sync with the server, and deleting the ~/News/agent directory fixed
>> the problem.

> Gnus has stopped enabling the Agent by default now, but older
> installations can still get in the way.  I've Cc'd this to the Gnus
> mailing list -- do any of you know why the Agent got so wildly out of
> what with nnimap in the past?

I need the Agent with nnimap.  And I think Gnus should enable the Agent
everywhere by default nowadays.  Most/all other MUAs do.

> that I'm tempted to go back to just storing this data in the plain-text
> ~/.authinfo file until all this has been worked out.

No!!!! Or only after prompting the user five times for
(different) confirmation.

> When writing the ~/.authinfo.gpg file, the user should be queried one
> thing: "Password for ~/.authinfo.gpg: ****".  And that's it, in my
> extremely humble opinion.

I partly agree, though some users won't have a key-pair setup, others
will have several, so the right thing to do may be either to use
symmetric encryption, or to guess which key-pair to use, and since it's
a guess there needs to be a way for the user to override the guess.

        Stefan