There are many different ways of managing passwords. KDE has KWallet, Mozilla has its ystem, opera has its own password management too, and so on. There is a wishlist/bug in KDE to add Single Sign-On to KWallet. This is going to take some time to be addressed, and will only happen in KDE 4. http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92845 Gnome had a pam_keychain system to handle passwords, which is unmaintained. http://www.flyn.org/projects/pam_keyring/index.html From the KDE bug listing they point to an Apple Developer page explaining how things work on Mac OS X for an application to access the keychain services. What I think is that something like Single Sign On only lives up to its name if it is standard across every (or almost) application. Right now we have a plethora of password management systems. I think FreeDesktop.org is the best suited entity to push a Working Group, Inviting KDE/Gnome/XFCE/Enlightenment/Fluxbox/Mozilla/Opera/etc developers to talk about it, and get the hands dirty, instead of having everyone reinventing the wheel and having incompatible implementations. I hope this idea is welcomed in freedesktop.org and embraced by the community!
The link to the Apple documentation: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Security/Conceptual/keychainServConcepts/02concepts/chapter_2_section_1.html
PAM_KEYRING for GNOME is not dead any more: http://www.hekanetworks.com/index.php/publisher/articleview/frmArticleID/25/staticId/31/ Perhaps its maintainer is a friendly combatant in the quest for a multiplatform password managing framework?
the bug tracker is not really the place for this -- can you please start a discussion on xdg@lists.freedesktop.org?
See also bug 16581, which set up a mailing list for discussing this. For reference, I think the current gnome keyring system is http://live.gnome.org/Seahorse
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