Re: Modifying Emacs to use the Mac OS X Keychain Services

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Sat, 28 May 2011 12:16:53 -0500 Ben Key <address@hidden> wrote: 

BK> The point is, I can implement ns- equivalents in C for most, if not all of
BK> the functions defined in secrets.el with the same parameters and nearly the
BK> same behavior.  I may even be able to make them behave exactly the same as
BK> their secrets.el counterparts.

BK> Once the functions are defined in C, we can later decide how to call them
BK> from Lisp.  We can decide to call them from secrets.el by having each of the
BK> functions use the following psudeo code

BK> (if (fboundp 'ns-{func})
BK>   call ns-{func}
BK> use dbus)

BK> or we could add another auth source to auth-source.el.  Either way would
BK> work for me.

It should definitely be another auth source.  auth-source.el could use
the similarities between the Secrets and Keychain APIs to simplify the
code as you suggest.

BK> Perhaps I should just focus on writing the ns- equivalents of each of the
BK> secrets.el functions and we can decide later how to call them.  What do you
BK> think?

Yes, please.

BK> Note: I am not exactly certain how to parse the attributes parameter of my
BK> proposed ns-secrets-create-item function.  If someone can point me to an
BK> example of how to process something like that in C it would be helpful.

Do you mean you want them to look like this (example from secrets.el):

((:user . "joe") (:host ."remote-host"))

You don't have to do it that way, but it's probably easiest to keep your
API similar to secrets.el.  So in C, just go through the list.  Start
with x = the list and do:

(x, cell, key, and val are Lisp_Objects)

while (! NILP (x))
{
 cell = Fcar(x)
 key = Fcar(cell)
 val = Fcdr(cell)
(... use key and val ...)
 x = Fcdr(x)
}

Expect the key to be a symbol and the val to be a string, so you may
want to convert them or throw an error if they are not.  I hope this is
helpful.

Ted