What to do if NTLM is not accepted by ASF

[Karl Wright <da...@gmail.com>]

"In a separate thread, we should discuss workarounds/fallback plans so
that we are prepared either way."

NTLM support of one form or another is critical for most of the
Windows-based repositories.  This includes SharePoint, Meridio, and
LiveLink.

For HttpClient 4.x, they went so far as to remove even 3.x's limited
support for NTLM.  What they did instead was to point you at jCIFS and
tell you how to write an authentication provider using some of the
jCIFS methods to do the proper signatures.  So, our options are
(appears to me):

(1) Get the NTLM implementation accepted, and preferably integrated
upstream into HttpClient 4.x.
(2) Convert everything to HttpClient 4.0, and either provide some kind
of reflection-based hook for it that will make use of jCIFS if it is
present, but fall back to no NTLM support if not, or better yet, add
an authentication provider registry to HttpClient 4.0 that would make
everyone's life easier in the long run.

Note that there's a real problem with testing here - I don't have
access to (say) a SharePoint server on an NTLMv2-protected domain
right now, so how are we to check whether this works?

Karl