moving X11 portforwarding out into a "plugin" framework

[Brian J. Murrell]

I think everyone will admit that X11 forwarding has been an incredible feature
in [open]ssh.  X11 is not the only local->remote protocol that might be useful 
across an SSH session however.

But having to hack the code for new protocols as they come around seems silly.  
Wouldn't it be more useful to be able to describe a protocol that needs 
forwarding and some configuration that might need doing on each end outside of 
the source code?

Then as new applications come along that could take advantage of port forward-
ing can "plug in" to this system and get their protocols forwarded across X 
without having to hack the openssh code and push it upstream, etc.

I would imagine on the local side, the ssh client would need to be able to 
forward into unix and ipv4/6 sockets and on the remote side one would need to
be able to possibly create sockets and/or set environment variables, etc.

Thots?

b.