A story of authentication

[Kenneth Kalmer]

Hi all

I updated some of my projects to move from taf2-curb-0.4.1 to the latest taf2-curb-0.5.4 and wasted some time figuring out why authentication was suddenly failing.

0.4.1 had the behavior where it would attempt to call a resource, and upon getting a 401 it would retry with the provided credentials. This was annoying, especially when hammering a slow rails app, but we could look the other way.

0.5.4 suddenly didn't have this behavior, it simply ignores the fact that you have userpwd set and errors out. This was a little unexpected, but setting http_auth_types solved it.

I propose a little convention over configuration tweak. Setting userpwd should automatically set http_auth_types to at least CURLAUTH_BASIC, or even all the possible types, if they aren't set yet. This makes it more natural: "I gave you credentials now use them". Easy out the box, but still powerful enough for the power users.

What do you think?

Thanks for the great library, I'm really happy with it and am using it in a lot of different applications.

Best

--
Kenneth Kalmer
kenneth...@gmail.com
http://opensourcery.co.za
@kennethkalmer