On the subject of hacking qpopper for LDAP etc.

3.1.2 has a bunch of calls to getpwnam scattered about the place which means
that in certain configurations it will do a passwd file lookup 5 times each
time someone pops their mail. It also makes replacing the passwd file with
something like LDAP or MySQL kinda awkward.

I submitted a patch that makes qpopper lookup up your passwd info once, at 
the very start then just keep that info in memory. So now it's dead easy to
replace the single getwnam() call with the lookup function of your choice.

I was told the changes would be included in the next release. That was the
middle of January and there's hasn't been a release since (has there? I've
been on holidays a bit...) Alternatives to the passwd file seem to be a
fairly popular topic on this list. Any chance we're going to see that 
release soon? In case it doesn't happen for a long time, I'll send the
patches to the list too.

The next step I'd like to take is to make a simple plugin system for passwd
file lookup which can be enabled with a configure option. If that was in
place people would no longer have to patch qpopper to get away from 
/etc/passwd. It would also make life much easier for those of us who
maintain these alternative auth methods as we wouldn't have to keep updating
out patches for every new release.

I had this working for Linux on an old version of qpopper, it's very simple
- you just have to add about 6 lines of C and some some changes to the
configure script. If I thought it would get into the official version I'd  
submit it and hopefully make it more cross-platform. If it went into LX too
then all the same auth methods would become available to LX customers too
with no extra work... so how about it?

Fergal

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