If we merge this pull request we might be *removing* working stuff.
That is true, but the question here is whether that stuff was ever *intended* to work. It's certainly not been tested, from what I recall - the reason we originally didn't try to figure out how to get all the bundles loaded in Karaf because we decided that we only wanted/needed to support ssh-agent over netcat.
How about sending an email to user@ to see if any other agentproxy scenarios are in use? If so, then we can indeed consider the custom ConnectorFactory approach involving classloading that you described.
Regards ap