Gsoc is over, we have a Python Keyring lib

The Google Summer of Code is over and thefirst version of the keyring library was released last week by Kang at PyPI.

How Keyring works, the big picture

This library implements a simple plugin system. Each plugin has to implement a set of methods described in an abstract class and can wrap any underlying Keyring system. We called those plugins "backends". The nice thing about it is that you can implement your own custom backend and make it available through the Keyring configuration file.

Kang has coded various Keyring backends in C and C++ extensions, for KWallet, Keychain, and Gnome. We also have added a Keyring implementation that uses the Win32Crypto API so windows users can use the lib.

When the Keyring lib is used, all declared plugins, whether they are provided by the lib itself or by a third party package, will be loaded. Then they will be asked a simple question:

"Can you run in this environment ?"

The backend can answer one of these:
- "Yes, I could work in this environment" - "No, I can't" - "Yes and you should use me !"

The library filters out backends that can't work on the target, sort the remaining ones, and get one of the best backend. This doesn't happens of course if you explicitely define which backend you want to use, which is possible.

What's next

Keyring 0.1 is out and there will probably be 1 or 2 releases to stabilize the code.

The next steps will be :
- to use it in Distutils, with a soft dependency : Distutils will let you use it through configuration if it detects Keyring is installed. - to promote its usage and in particular see if projects like Mercurial could use it - to work on a PEP for its integration in Python stdlib, in the getpass module