Unix socket forwarding

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 03/05/2012 04:11 PM, William Ahern wrote:
> I'm intimately aware of the details. Outside of the core developers and a
> small cadre of hackers I probably became more familiar with the OpenSSH
> codebase than anyone else. It's an intrusive patch and required additions to
> the underlying protocol, fixes to options parsing code, and a refactoring of
> several data structures and related code. The fact that X11 forwarding
> already exists--as pointed out by the OP--turns out to not matter one iota
> because of the SSH protocol spec and the architecture of OpenSSH in
> particular.

yikes!  I can see why something this hairy would make upstream shy.  Are
the extensions to the protocol documented someplace?  I couldn't find
them at http://www.25thandclement.com/~william/projects/streamlocal.html

> The fact that everybody but the core developers think it's a
> good idea, and yet I've been the only one to cook up a patch, tends to
> suggest a lack of substantive demand. Or perhaps my patch sufficed for the
> those who really needed the feature, which lessed pressure for inclusion or
> addition upstream. Who knows?

It's also possible that the feasibility of hooking ssh into a common
utility like socat satisfies the majority of users who want the
functionality but can't vet such a complex/complicated patch.

	--dkg