[darcs-users] ssh path

Petr Rockai me at mornfall.net
Thu Nov 22 20:17:59 UTC 2007


"Yitzchak Gale" <gale at sefer.org> writes:
> Finally - although SSH is still widely used and
> widely supported, it is officially viewed as
> deprecated by the IETF. Like other VCSs,
> we should start migrating towards WebDAV
> over an encrypted channel.
1) Can you please give a reference to the place where SSH is claimed
to be deprecated? I cannot find it. You may mean the SSH1 protocol,
but that's largely unused for a long time. 2) WebDAV is horribly
broken, at least in most current implementations. It is very
inconvenient to set up authentication for it. And SSH is widely
available, on all platforms you can think of.

As for botnet hammering, I don't really think it is that urgent, still
a lot less traffic than mail. So this is fairly relative. As for
setting ports, there's always ~/.ssh/config (at least with OpenSSH on
Unix), where you can specify default port for each host separately.

> 1. VERY URGENT - Fix SSH port support on
>    Windows. Either in darcs itself, or by providing
>    wrappers for the PuTTY commands.
>
> 2. Urgent - Add an --ssh-port option to darcs
>    commands that use SSH, or parse the port
>    number in URLs, or both.
>
> 3. Important - Add WebDAV support to darcs.

I think there are *much* more important issues for darcs than those,
especially the last one. And all of these are fairly easily
implemented, so you could probably provide patches for first two, it
should be a fairly easy task (and you are apparently motivated, since
you consider it a very urgent feature). The last one depends on
availability of WebDAV implementations, which may be a problem. Also,
it is usually a royal PITA to set up on the server side properly, so
it is probably only useful for people who either have WebDAV server
already (I assume a smallish minority of darcs users) or those who
care enough to set up one (but since SSH usually works for them, I
doubt many will -- and SSH is, at least for subversion, considerably
faster than WebDAV, which is pretty inefficient).

Yours, 
  Petr Ročkai.

PS: I do not speak on behalf of darcs or the development team in any
way. Just private opinion.

-- 
Peter Rockai | me()mornfall!net | prockai()redhat!com
 http://blog.mornfall.net | http://web.mornfall.net

"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
 indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
     -- Blair P. Houghton on the subject of C program indentation


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