OpenSSH library

[Nicolas.Williams at ubsw.com]

The OpenSSH code is far from usable as a library. Throughout the OpenSSH code you'll find the use of globals and static globals and calls to fatal() (which is a fancy wrapper around exit()) and so on, to say nothing of the fact that OpenSSH has its own event loop and, if you want to use OpenSSH as a library, you have to either fit the app into that loop or abstract the loop so the library could fit into the app's event loop - or use multiple threads (but OpenSSH code is not thread-safe currently).

So no, you can't make a useful library out of OpenSSH as it stands.

A lot of the major issues that prevent OpenSSH from being made into a library could be fixed with some work. Stuff the globals into a context structure, make sure it gets passed around... give the app a way to register its own exit() and select() functions for use by the library (the app-provided exit() might just longjmp()), provide an I/O abstraction so the app can read/write from/to SSH channels, etc... Actually, that's a bit more than "some work"...

But I kinda doubt that libopenssh is a goal or a high-priority goal for the OpenSSH folk. In the meantime you can use ssh w/ pipes and/or port forwarding to achieve mostly the same effect, though with more context switching and data copying.

Cheers,

Nico
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