[paramiko] Paramiko and win-ssh-agent

[Robey Pointer]

On 17 Dec 2006, at 2:06, Patrick Mézard wrote:

> Robey Pointer wrote:
>> On 27 Nov 2006, at 12:33, Patrick Mézard wrote:
>>> Basically, I wrote something compatible with cygwin unix domain  
>>> sockets and patch it in the existing paramiko.Agent  
>>> implementation. It works for me so... I think the implementation  
>>> has the following drawbacks:
>>> - completely tied to cygwin unix socket implementation. I think  
>>> this is OK, the handshake protocol have been stable for at least  
>>> a year.
>>> - cygwin module reads cygwin /etc/passwd at load time to get user  
>>> id and group id. I assumed people have the permissions to read  
>>> this, probably OK, at least in a cygwin context.
>>> - cygwin root directory is read from PARAMIKO_CYGPATH. It could  
>>> probably be done in smarter ways, but it works and is simple.  
>>> Good enough for now, will not be hard to improve if necessary.
>> There's a lot of cygwin magic in this patch.  Can't cygwin just  
>> implement the local-domain socket API and hide all of these  
>> details in there?  The stuff about parsing the socket file just  
>> looks really fragile.
>
> All the black magic is hidden in cygwin.py, the only reason to  
> patch agent.py is I cannot provide non-connected sockets.
>
> I do not really get what you mean by "Can't cygwin just implement  
> the local-domain socket API and hide all of these details in  
> there?". Which cygwin are you talking about: the python module or  
> the project ? Could you elaborate on the code changes you have in  
> mind ? I agree that all the hand-shaking stuff relies on Cygwin  
> implementation details but I do not see how it can be done  
> otherwise, but by asking cygwin developers to keep it stable...

What I mean is:  IMHO, the details of how to emulate a local-domain  
socket are best left inside the cygwin module -- either in their  
"libc" or in the python wrapper.  In other words, I think a socket 
(AF_LOCAL, ...) call should be caught by the cygwin libraries and  
handled accordingly.  Does that not work?

I just imagine that paramiko is not the only python code out there  
that tries to use local-domain sockets... :)


> I agree it might be too fragile for you to integrate in Paramiko as  
> such. At least people could find the patch on the mailing list if  
> they ever need it.

Agreed, it's a useful patch in that respect.  I'm just hoping it  
could be made much smaller and included in paramiko directly.

robey