2011-08-30



Motivated by, [0] I finally changed the passphrase of my gpg keys
to a much better one.



ssh and scp suffer because they don't understand the port  number
as  part  of the resource identifier. If service-to-port bindings
would be constant, this wouldn't be a  thing,  but  they  aren't.
Thus  ssh/scp's  address notation is insufficient. Specifying the
port number as separate argument creates many problems:

Most visible, but least important is the `-p'/`-P' inconsistency.

A real fail is the inability to copy  files  between  two  remote
machines if both ssh servers listen on non-standard ports:

     $ scp -P1234 foo.example.org:file bar.example.org:
     ssh: connect to host bar.example.org port 22: Connection refused
     lost connection

Next: Every tool which supports ssh resource identifiers needs to
support  `-p/-P'  arguments and pass them through. debsign(1) and
debrsign(1) are ones which don't. (They caused this text.)

Okay, people say that this can be solved with  `ssh_config',  but
that's only a hack, no real solution.

The port number needs to be part of the identifier, as  shown  by
mercurial. This is mercurial's way of specifying an ssh resource:

     ssh://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path]

Protocol -- identity -- host -- port -- path.

That's how ssh and scp should have done it too.  A resource iden-
tifier  need  to be *one* entity -- the extrapolation of the file
name to a path name, and  further  augmented  by  the  host,  the
service/protocol, the port and the user's identity.

With such resource identifiers, this would be possible:

     $ better-scp foo.example.org:1234//etc/motd bar.example.org:9876//tmp

     $ debrsign example.org:4567 foo.changes

But unfortunately, both are not.

[0]  http://xkcd.com/936/


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>