Friday 16 February 2018

Software whose authors won't update to keep up with advances

Now and then I am frustrated by software that doesn't implement modern functionality. So I'm creating a dynamic list here of the ones I've come across, if only to get the annoyance off my chest. If subsequent changes prove me wrong, let me know in the comments and I'll be more than happy to remove the software from this list.

Fetchmail

Google keeps nagging me to disable less secure apps for my accounts. But I can't do this yet because fetchmail doesn't implement OAuth2. Apparently somebody has submitted changes to implement this but it isn't in the mainline code. I've also started looking at the Perl script fetchgmail. This however requires a lot of Perl modules to support so it was a chore to find the ready-made packages for my distro and use CPAN for the rest. But I may switch to this.

Addendum: A solution to this is to get an application specific password from Gmail settings just for fetchmail. In this case you are not exposing your login password in fetchmail config files.

Filezilla

Filezilla is a useful tool for sftp between hosts. At my workplace the Linux hosts are joined to the domain, and so support gssapi-with-mic from Windows workstations. Quite handy since the user is already authenticated to the domain. Openssh has supported gssapi-with-mic for quite a while, as has Putty. Again someone has submitted changes to Filezilla to implement this feature, but this has not been taken up.

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