Currently, there is only very limited and buggy support in Darcs for SSH through a non-standard port.
Limited - because you can only do it by setting an environment variable, SSH_PORT. Obviously, you cannot have this set the same way for all repositories. So you have to use messy shell hackery, outside of darcs, to get things to work right. Buggy - this currently does not work at all on Windows with the standard Darcs. Some of the SSH-ish commands supplied by PuTTY have different option names than the ones supplied by OpenSSH on other platforms. You can work around this with a hack by wrapping the PuTTY commands in something that changes the option names. But it should be fixed. And of course, the shell hackery isn't as easily available on Windows. In any case, it has become urgent for this feature to work correctly and conveniently on all platforms. Unfortunately, on today's Internet any server with the standard SSH port open gets continuously hammered by hundreds of botnet zombies that try to find username/password combinations by brute force. Disabling password authentication does not help - the zombies still hammer you. So you just can't use the standard port anymore. It would be nice to be able make the port number part of the server address somehow, but that syntax is already far too heavily overloaded. Although there is a standard place to specify it in a URL. The --ssh-cm option sets precedence for using darcs options to specify ssh configuration details. That would work as the next-best thing, since you can set it on a per-repository basis via the defaults file. Finally - although SSH is still widely used and widely supported, it is officially viewed as deprecated by the IETF. Like other VCSs, we should start migrating towards WebDAV over an encrypted channel. So, in summary, I am recommending the following, in decreasing order of urgency: 1. VERY URGENT - Fix SSH port support on Windows. Either in darcs itself, or by providing wrappers for the PuTTY commands. 2. Urgent - Add an --ssh-port option to darcs commands that use SSH, or parse the port number in URLs, or both. 3. Important - Add WebDAV support to darcs. Thanks, Yitz _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
