SASL is a very useful library that I’ve been using for years. It has one very annoying feature lacking though – an inability to handle crypt’d passwords. In an ideal world no password would ever be sent in the clear, but we don’t live in an ideal world and despite trying to persuade users to use the secure connections, they don’t always listen. The result is that I don’t know many people who still store plain text passwords.

The solution is to patch the library, but it gets annoying having to do it every time, and as I’m now using the ports tree on FreeBSD to install the library it gets even more annoying. The patch has been around for a long time and there seem to be a lot of people asking for the feature, so maybe the developers will eventually get the message? Let’s hope so.