The auth patch was contributed by Nicolas George.  Here is the excerpt from his
email describing how to use it.  Firstly, #define SIMPLE_AUTH or add -DSIMPLE_AUTH to CFLAGS.

  Then, I have implemented some basic handling of HTTP authentication. The
  concept is that if there is a file .http-auth in the root of one site,
  then it is an executable (most likely a script) that handles
  authorizations. It is called with first argument the virtual host name,
  second argument the path to the requested file, and third argument the
  value of the Authorization header, if present. If it exists
  successfully, access is granted, else 401.

  An example of .http-auth that grants the access only to the user Cigaes
  with password foober is:

  #!/bin/sh
  [ x"$3" = x"Basic Q2lnYWVzOmZvb2Jhcg==" ]

  The format of the Authorization is not very convenient. The mangled
  string is the base64 encoding of "$username:$password".