Ok I see now. So in practice, adding a new method `forceNoPassword` complicates the usage of the options, but treating the empty strings as a hint to indicate that no password or private key should be used seems still more obfuscated and difficult to use.
The main problem here is that the purpose of the `LoginCredentials` object is to transport the credentials, not to choose an authentication method, which is what you want to achieve. To keep the same interface and the current implementation unchanged (and thus, any existing code working), but with better semantics, what about creating a subclass of the `LoginCredentials`, say `SshAgentAuthentication`? The class could throw an `UnsupportedOperationException` when setting the password or private key and allow to set the username. Using that subclass in the `overrideLoginCredentials` should work for you and the code would be more readable and the responsibilitties of each class well defined. WDYT? --- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/jclouds/jclouds/pull/486#issuecomment-52407035
