[darcs-users] ssh path

Yitzchak Gale gale at sefer.org
Sun Nov 25 00:54:08 UTC 2007


Jorey Bump wrote:
> Just use "host", since that is the default syntax.

That default syntax, and the man page purporting
to explain it, are highly misleading, at least for
our purposes. That's the whole point here.

We're not out to educate people about SSH.
We just want to make it as clear as possible
how to use Darcs.

It turns out that in order to use Darcs with SSH
in many common situations, you need to know
how to create a symbol that represents a set of
SSH configurations for a repo, _as_contrasted_with_
specifying SSH configurations for a host.

We want to get across how to do that in a very
brief, very intuitive way, without launching into a
whole explanation of how ssh works.

Below is my next attempt.

> ...you haven't nearly tapped the potential until you start
> using ssh-agent and public key authentication... If
> you're a heavy user of SSH, this is indispensible.

If you're a darcs user it is even more indispensable.
You can't use darcs with SSH without it. That's
why this is already explained on the WindowsConfiguration
page. I guess we're assuming that your average
Unix user will already know about this one.

Next attempt:

You can also use:

session_name:/path/to/repository

On Windows, "session_name" is the name of a
"Saved Session" defined in PuTTY. On other
platforms, you can define "session_name"
by adding something like this to your ssh
configuration file:

Host session_name
 HostName example.com
 User user_name
 ...other configuration...

See PuTTY help and the ssh_config(5) man page for more
details. This is the preferred way to customize
SSH settings, such as the port number, for a
Darcs repository.

Thanks,
Yitz


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