[Spice-devel] [spice-gtk 0/5] Add support for looking up connection credentials in a file

[Marc-André Lureau]

----- Mensaje original -----
> On Tue, Jun 04, 2013 at 10:44:45AM -0400, Marc-André Lureau wrote:
> > > This patch series adds support for something similar to what is described
> > > in http://libvirt.org/auth.html: when a password is needed but it hasn't
> > > been provided, we search for a file containing the auth info. It can be
> > > specified through an environment variable, in the SPICE URI, then it's
> > > looked up in XDG_CONFIG_DIR, and finally in /etc/libvirt/auth.conf.
> > > There
> > > are a few things that may deserve polishing in this scheme:
> > > - it's quite libvirt centered with respects to the naming of the env var,
> > >   of the default dir locations, ...
> > > - the port number needs to be added to the auth-$SERVICE-$HOSTNAME scheme
> > >   described on http://libvirt.org/auth.html as multiple VMs can run on
> > >   the
> > >   same host
> > > - it does not go very well with libvirt automatic spice port allocation
> > > as
> > >   the credential file has to hardcode the port numbers, but the port
> > >   number
> > >   is not fixed when using automatic allocation
> > > 
> > > I still think this can be useful to people who are looking for a way to
> > > pass spice password to the client without passing it on the command line
> > > as
> > > was suggested in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=794644#c6
> > 
> > Spice-gtk is a library. Each Spice client may decide to provide
> > credentials in its own way.
> > 
> > Why should spice-gtk bypass that? Since it's so libvirt-centered, why did
> > you look for a solution in spice-gtk instead of virt-viewer?
> 
> In my opinion this fits best in spice-gtk so that we can document this in
> one place, and have all applications using spice-gtk benefits from this
> This is better than letting each application reinvent the wheel.

I don't think it is the right place to solve the problem.

virt-viewer has to auth against several servers, spice, vnc, libvirt, ovirt, (and could soon support rdp etc)

> What is libvirt-centered in these patches is just the env var/file names
> (LIBVIRT_AUTH_FILE, $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/libvirt/auth.conf,
> /etc/libvirt/auth.conf), this is trivial to change to something else if we
> don't like it.

Then maybe we should get rid of that, and perhaps libvirt format doesn't fit well spice-gtk.

Since you can already provide the password via either URI argument or by API, there is no need for an additional way in spice-gtk.

Also, as you noted, it doesn't fit well with dynamic ports usually used with remote desktop protocols, we better keep password handling at application/virt-viewer level.