[pmwiki-users] HTTP Authentication and use of login name

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 10:25:17PM +0200, Dominique Faure wrote:
> On 6/15/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 02:03:01PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> > > On the other hand, where BA is used with obscure names like
> > > "user234", it would be nice to allow the user to enter a friendlier
> > > author name. I toyed with have a translation table and doing a lookup
> > > where user234 became "NeilHerber". Patrick even supplied me the code
> > > on this list many months ago.
> >
> > ...and I've played with the idea that authuser.php could
> > automatically map userids to author-friendly names -- I'm still
> > working out the syntax for it.
> >
> 
> Why not use a kind of email recipient syntax as in the Site.AuthUser excerpt:
> 
> alice(Alice Pleasance Liddell): (:encrypt wonderland:)
> dorothy(Dorothy Gale): (:encrypt toto:)
> 
> Concerning htpasswd files, according to apache's own file content
> handling (as I could saw in v2.0.x sources), each lines could contains
> one or more fields than the login and a password ones (aka they are
> gracefully discarded while computed by the web server).

What I think would be better than trying to tie this to a particular
authentication mechanism, would be to have something independent of
authentication, just something which maps between ID and Author name.
(AuthId -> Author)

That way it wouldn't matter *which* authentication mechanism was used,
whether AuthUser or UserAuth or httpasswd or Apache BA or whatever.

Kathryn Andersen
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