Re: tramp and ssh-agent / ssh-add

[Roland Winkler]

On Sun Mar 30 2008 Michael Albinus wrote:
> > (I know that tramp is intended to provide a general scheme for file
> > transfer. Are there other schemes besides beside ssh that use an
> > agent like ssh? Gpg comes with an agent. But I guess that this is a
> > different story.)
> 
> There are also plink/pscp, which use pageant as agent. All of them from
> the PuTTY package.
> 
> However, what I would like to have is a general identity handling
> mechanism in Emacs. This shouldn't be restricted to Tramp only. There
> shall be interfaces to ssh-agent, to the Gnome and KDE keyring managers,
> to gpg, etc.
> 
> So I'm not convinced yet to start a Tramp-only solution. password.el,
> which is used by Tramp, is also no own development; it comes from Gnus.

That's a very good point. With more programs using a similar
approach, it would be nice if this could be done in a coherent way.
(Personally, I do not know anything about Gnome and KDE.)

Should this discussion be continued on emacs-devel? (I do not know
about xemacs.)

Roland