Re: [PATCH] git-send-email: add ~/.authinfo parsing

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:53:19AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Either way it still encourages a plaintext password to be on disk,
which may not be what we want, even though it may be slight if not
really much of an improvement.  Again the Help-for-users has this
amusing bit:

I do not mind a .netrc or .authinfo parser, because while those formats
do have security problems, they are standard files that may already be
in use. So as long as we are not encouraging their use, I do not see a
problem in supporting them (and we already do the same with curl's netrc
support).

But it would probably make sense for send-email to support the existing
git-credential subsystem, so that it can take advantage of secure
system-specific storage. And that is where we should be pointing new
users. I think contrib/mw-to-git even has credential support written in
perl, so it would just need to be factored out to Git.pm.

-Peff