Developers of Sympa

[Serge <address@concealed>]

Adam Bernstein wrote:

> The new features in 5.2, especially the intelligent VERP 
> implementation, look *great*.  So of course I have to bring up another 
> big one:
>
> Sympa list archive RSS feeds are currently accessible only for 
> publicly visible archives, and there is a fundamental reason: RSS 
> readers can login using HTTP authentication, but not with cookies, and 
> Sympa relies on login cookies.  Yes?  So the only way to allow access 
> to protected RSS feeds would be to totally change the way Sympa 
> handles logins?
>
> I ask because the RSS feed feature is also a great one, but it's 
> almost entirely useless for most of the people that want to use it, 
> because what they want is to see the latest postings on private 
> lists.  I don't expect a solution to this problem anytime soon, but I 
> thought I'd mention that without it, the RSS feature is mostly a dead 
> end for our users -- and more and more of them are looking for it.

You are right.

The way we manage authentication in Sympa is going to change totally as 
described in the page 
http://www.sympa.org/wiki/doku.php?id=project_direction . But this will 
not solve the problem.
Because RSS readers to not manage cookies, the only solution could be 
collect authentication information from the URL ( a part of the URL 
could be some personnal secret sent to a particular authenticated user 
). In fact, we could introduce the sympa_user cookie value in the URL.  
Unfortunitly, this secret URL may become public as soon as some user 
brodcast this URL to some french or copy it to a page which is collected 
by google ...

Any proposition ?
Serge