[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#470599: Bug#470599: Bug#470599: /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc ignores Xsession.options in handling ssh-agent

[novakyu]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:13 AM, Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac at debian.org> wrote:
>  Well, it kills ssh-agent only if it has run it. And it kills the one it
>  ran, using SSH_AGENT_PID.
>  So if you run keychain after that, it shouldn't kill its ssh-agent. If
>  it does, there's a bug in ssh-agent.

I see that I was mistaken about what ssh-agent -k actually does (and
it's probably improbable for a program to export a new SSH_AGENT_PID
into the shell process running xfce4's xinitrc).

But the main problem is, keychain won't run another ssh-agent process if
it finds one already running. This is its sole purpose---enable use of
the same ssh-agent across logins---so that can't be "fixed" (unless
there's an easy way to distinguish xfce4-launched ssh-agent processes
from ssh-agent process from a previous session).

And what I really consider as bug isn't the fact that xfce4 runs
ssh-agent---it's the fact that to disable it, one has to dig into
xfce4-specific xinitrc, if one knows to look there at all (I didn't and
it took me a while before I decided grepping the entire /etc for
"ssh-agent" would be faster).

I thought in Debian this can really be considered a bug, given that
Xsession.options can be expected to exist and options set there ought to
be respected, but perhaps the XFCE4 developers can gauge better whether
the same can be expected on other distributions as well and xfce4's own
xinitrc should check for a central options file for common configurables.

That is, if they can spare time for a minor issue like this (probably
affecting ... only keychain users).

Thanks,

Andrzej