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

[Brian J. Murrell]

Alex Bligh <alex <at> alex.org.uk> writes: 
> 
> Right, but there is generalised forwarding of TCP there already with -L,
> -R and -D options.

Fair enough.  But at least one of the use-cases I am thinking of (dbus) uses a 
unix socket on the client side.  This generalized forwarding should support 
tunneling into a unix socket, IMHO.

> x11 is a special case partly because traditionally
> it uses UDP

No.  X11 is TCP.

> and partly because it is desirable to integrate authentication.

That might be true but another reason it's desirable to have specialized 
forwarding and not just generic TCP forwarding is for the setting of the DISPLAY 
variable on the server side.  That is another feature that I think a generalized 
forwarding framework should/would support.  As I've said before, it might also 
require creating a socket and shuttling data to and from it on the server and/or 
client side.

> Just wrap your protocol
> in TCP or a unix pipe, and you're done.

I'd bet more times than not it's not that simple.  Typically, processes on the 
server side need to know where to reach it's peer and, in the desktop protocol 
paradigm at least, that is typically done by setting and reading environment 
variables.