I think the reason was that setting this globally will prevent individual users from taking advantage of the full function of programs. For instance, (IIRC) if the user wants to auto-select the mechanism, having SASL_MECH set globally will disallow this.
Well, feel free to back out the patch. It seems to me, though, that if the administrator wants to force the use of a specific set of SASL mechanisms, they should be able to.
Hm, like I only want to allow GSSAPI? ;) (and maybe EXTERNAL someday).
--Quanah
-- Quanah Gibson-Mount Principal Software Developer ITSS/Shared Services Stanford University GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html