moving X11 portforwarding out into a & quot; plugin& quot; framework

[Alex Bligh]

--On 24 January 2010 14:20:06 +0000 "Brian J. Murrell" 
<brian at interlinx.bc.ca> wrote:

>> (not that I quite understand what Brian is trying to do).
>
> Well, there are a number of examples, off the top of my head, of
> protocols that  could benefit from being tunneled, from a remote machine
> to a local machine,  running a gnome desktop, for example.  Pulseaudio is
> one, dbus is another. There are likely others, perhaps more application
> specific even.  But the idea  that every application writer needs to go
> through a standardization process as  well as hacking the openssh code
> directly just seems, IMHO, silly.  Rather, there should be this framework
> that these application vendors, or O/S  distributors perhaps, can utilize
> to get their protocols forwarded.

Right, but there is generalised forwarding of TCP there already with -L,
-R and -D options. x11 is a special case partly because traditionally
it uses UDP and partly because it is desirable to integrate authentication.
I can see how generalised UDP forwarding might be useful. Equally,
if it had more than a trivial userbase, SCTP forwarding. But the whole
point of layered stacks is that you should neither need to hack ssh
/or/ go through a standardisation process. Just wrap your protocol
in TCP or a unix pipe, and you're done. openssh will do it already,
without code change. And interoperate with other vendors.
That's how unix tends to work.

-- 
Alex Bligh