[ITP] win-ssh-agent 1.07

[Eric Blake]

On 11/04/2011 12:37 AM, Nayuta Taga wrote:
> 2011/11/4 Christopher Faylor
>> On Thu, Nov 03, 2011 at 09:52:20AM -0400, Andrew Schulman wrote:
>>>> I'd like to package and maintain win-ssh-agent for Cygwin.

-1, for reasons below...

>>>> With the win-ssh-agent, we can use the ssh-agent (available inthe
>>>> cygwin openssh) in the more smart way.
>>>> Normally, we need to start all relevant programs, which mightneed to

I'm not sure why your mail came through so garbled, but the large number 
of missing spaces in your message distracts from your attempt to appear 
professional in offering a package.

>>>> use the ssh, as child processes of the shell(e.g. bash) in which you
>>>> eval'ed the ssh-agent. ?Because, theprograms must be able to refer to
>>>> environment variables thatset by the ssh-agent.
>>>> The win-ssh-agent enables all programs to refer to theenvironment
>>>> variables of the ssh-agent, i.e. theSSH_AUTH_SOCK. ?Now, we no longer
>>>> need to start programs aschild processes of the shell.

> Example:
>
> Consider the ntemacs ( http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/windows/ ) .

Non-cygwin program.  If someone is willing to download a non-cygwin 
ntemacs, then they can also download a non-cygwin win-ssh-agent.

> (3) I want to use the tramp ( http://www.gnu.org/s/tramp/ ) in the
>      ntemacs.  With it, I can treat documents on the remote machine
>      as if they are on the local machine by:
>             C-x C-f /sshx:username<at>hostname:~/remote-file

Have you tried using the emacs that ships with cygwin?  It includes 
tramp.elc already built in, without needing a separate download.  But if 
you are using the distro emacs, it seems like you are already okay using 
the distro for firing up that emacs instance, at which point I don't see 
a need for a gui frontend.

Unless you can give an example where an app in the cygwin distro would 
be benefitted by adding a gui front-end to setting up the ssh-agent, and 
why existing mechanisms of starting any cygwin app via a simple shell 
script wrapper that attaches to $HOME/.keychain/${HOSTNAME}-sh if 
already present, then I don't see why the cygwin distro needs 
win-ssh-agent.  I'm not saying that win-ssh-agent is bad (on the 
contrary, it does seem to help your use case of ntemacs), just that 
since your primary use case demonstration was as a stand-alone app for 
helping other non-cygwin apps, and not something that fills a void for 
interaction with existing cygwin apps.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake@redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org