Request for review: keychain

[Paul Howarth]

Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am Di, den 12.07.2005 schrieb Chip Turner um 5:54:
> 
> 
>>It would be nicer to have some sort of opt-in, perhaps in the form of
>>~/.keychainrc, which, if present, causes it to be source'd and then,
>>if set, use an environment variable KEYS to list the keys the user
>>wants, otherwise default to id_dsa.  This way a user just specifies
>>their keys that feed the command line (and perhaps other command line
>>options such as timeout).
>>
>>Chip
> 
> 
> I think it makes sense regarding ease of use, to have a mechanism which
> allows the user to opt-in keychaining easily. Thanks for that suggestion
> Chip, Ed and Ville.
> 
> I kindly request to review following bah script:
> 
> http://www.uni-x.org/keychain.sh.txt
> 
> I plan to let the keychain rpm place keychain.{sh,csh} - csh needs to be
> done (help would be welcome as I am a bash user) - into /etc/profile.d/.
> It will then create a ~/.keychainrc file if none exists already. The
> user is able to adjust keychain behaviour through that file then.
> 
> Any kind of critics and of course corrections are welcome.

This is quite a complicated script to maintain in two different formats, 
particularly since it's sourcing a sh-format ~/.keychainrc file. Would 
it not be possible to put this in a helper script in /usr/bin (or 
wherever's convenient) and then call it from 
/etc/profile.d/keychain.{sh,csh}, thus making those two scripts much 
smaller and possibly even identical? I don't see any environment 
variables being exported, so is it really necessary to "source" all this 
stuff?

Paul.