Re: Committing new smtpmail.el later tonight

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

> So I think that we have two situations to handle:
> - smtpmail-auth-credentials is set and auth-source can't find
>   credentials (i.e. the user hasn't migrated yet), so we should warn the
>   user about the need to migrate and give some pointer of how to do it.

It could just ask "Update ~/.authinfo with SMTP credentials?" and write
to the file, perhaps?

> - smtpmail-auth-credentials is set and auth-source can also find credentials
>   (i.e. the user has migrated but still has the old setting).

So we would prefer credentials from auth-source, which is OK.  My worry
is that the user would not necessarily be aware of this (unless we issue
warnings), and would tinker with `smtpmail-auth-credentials' in ~/.emacs
and not understand why the settings done there had any effect.

After all, most users just google stuff, and 95% of the web pages that
talk about this stuff will say "alter `smtpmail-auth-credentials'".  And
using that variable worked the first time Emacs 24 was used, but not
after altering the second time.

Seems like there would be plenty of possibilities to confuse the users
here. 

And at some point, we'll have to drop the variable.  I sort of feel that
we're prolonging the agony instead of making it swift and brutal.  :-)

Perhaps.

>   Here we can output a warning about the duplicate info, but it's not
>   high-priority and should be discrete.  After all, the user may use
>   such a config purposefully because she likes to share a single
>   config for different machines where she uses different versions of
>   Emacs.

Yes.  I'm not sure what would be the best way to do a discrete warning
that would still be visible enough that the user would actually see it.

If smtpmail.el just does

(message "Warning: Conflicting values from `smtpmail-auth-credentials'; using 
~/.authinfo instead")

then that would, in virtually all cases, just be overwritten by the

Sending...done

message after sending it, so the user wouldn't see it...

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  bloggy blog http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/