Re: [xmonad] darcs patch: add SshAgent module, to start ssh-agent when needed.

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 09:48:47PM +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote:

Am Samstag, den 29.03.2008, 12:55 -0400 schrieb David Roundy:

...

I'm sending this rather than pushing, since we're close to a release. It's a new module to automatically start an ssh-agent, if one isn't running. I expect to find it useful. The reason for this is that the ordinary mechanism for starting a single ssh-agent for an X session doesn't seem to be working for me. And starting xmonad with `ssh-agent xmonad` does no good, because the ssh-agent exits as soon as I restart xmonad.

David

Sat Mar 29 11:49:11 CDT 2008 David Roundy * add SshAgent module, to start ssh-agent when needed.

I wonder if this can not be solved outside xmonad – just seems to be out of scope for a window manager. If Jamie's tip works out for you, I think that should not be part of xmonad. (But then, if you think it'd be really useful, go ahead.)

Perhaps what would be better would be a prompt module to modify xmonad's environment at runtime. Jamie's approach isn't truly general: if anything happens to that ssh-agent, then you're up the creek without a paddle. The only approach is to do something like kill and restart xmonad from the command line (or just restart X) in order to change the SSH_AGENT_PID environment variable and the other one. That's pretty ugly, and results in losing all xmonad's state in either case. -- David Roundy Department of Physics Oregon State University