Re: Refactor elpa/oauth2.el to use plist over cl-defstruct

[Soham Gumaste]

Hello,

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

> I think this will break clients using the current interface of oauth2.el
> (including one of my small hack to use oauth2 for email authentication).
> Is there any functionalities that are missing and requiring such a
> breaking change?

Yes, and that is my biggest concern too.

> Agreed.  ISTR the recent discussion on cl-lib, which AIUI was about
> preloaded ELisp.  The other majority of code is not bound by this
> requirement, and cl-lib does make some tasks easier.  (But please do
> correct me.)

In this case, since `plstore` is used to store the information, it would 
make it much easier to use a plist as it could be stored and retrieved 
as-is, instead of having to convert between struct<-->plist every time.


> Ditto.  Do you have a proof-of-concept patch to look at?

I was writing the patch when I realised this change would make it 
easier, which is why I asked. My idea is to store a (lambda) function as 
the :secret attribute in the plstore, so that `auth-info-password` would 
invoke it when the secret is requested, resulting in a refresh if 
needed. I also want to add other parameters to the plstore entry like 
:host, :port and :user.

Secondly, another breaking change I want to propose is renaming the 
default plstore file from `oauth.plstore` to `oauth.plist`, as the 
auth-sources library uses the `.plist` extension to trigger the plstore 
backend instead of the netrc backend (this is not documented directly, I 
read the source code).

I will report back in this thread with a proof of concept soon, with the 
current cl-defstruct implementation. We can discuss further based on that.

Thanks