The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <address@concealed>]

Thanks for providing these informations Graham.

You're right, the obvious usage of OpenID for Sympa would be to act as OpenID consumer. Implementing OpenId this way would be similar to CAS or Shibboleth implementations we did (see http://www.sympa.org/wiki/manual/authentication#authentication).

You're also mentionning the possibility of Sympa acting as an OpenId provider. We are already using Sympa this way for our own wikis on www.sympa.org and www.cru.fr. Both authentication (email + password) and authorization (list membership) are based on Sympa. The wiki (dokuwiki) has been extended to query Sympa SOAP server.

You did not mention the CPAN OpenId modules :

• Net::OpenID::Server, http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/Net-OpenID-Server-0.11/lib/Net/OpenID/Server.pm
• Net::OpenID::Consumer, http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/Net-OpenID-Consumer-0.13/lib/Net/OpenID/Consumer.pm

These would be good candidates for us since 100% of the modules Sympa uses comes from CPAN.

Graham Todd a écrit :

[...]
Leveraging a large installed base of mailing list users to create an openid *provider* is interesting, but I don't know if it is possible or
desirable. It certainly would have to be turned off by default :-)
OpenID does raise interesting points of discussion for authentication security etc. that are best left to experts.

It could be a useful "feature" for sympa to have "login via openid".  My impression is that various openid tool makers are trying to make
implementing support for this easier using various openid libraries. A few of the web frameworks are building in openid too - I know catalyst
http://www.catalystframework.org/ has an OpenID::Auth module of some kind (maybe catalyst would make a nice web frontend for sympa heheh!).
sxip.org used to have a perl implementation of an openid/sxip *provider* (sxip and openid are merging or merged now I believe).

I think if each user of a sympa installation had their own unique "homepage" where openid attributes were published that would be a start
on implementing openid. (??) Right now sympa users have no unique URI to changes prefs etc. Instead one logs in and visits a URL like:

http://some-sympa-site.org/pref

I think probably something like:

http://some-sympa-site.org/users/username

would be required or maybe:

http://some-sympa-site.org/users/username/contact

But that would be only if sympa were able to act as an openid provider.
 Supporting openid logins from other provider's URIs might be easier.

some refs:

http://dev.aol.com/article/2007/05/openid_blog
http://search.cpan.org/~miyagawa/Catalyst-Plugin-Authentication-Credential-OpenID-0.02/
http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/Net-OpenID-Server-0.11/