Now it actually logs all its requests and responses, the fingerprints
of keys mentioned in all messages, and so on.
I've also added the -v option, which causes Pageant in any mode to
direct that logging information to standard error. In --debug mode,
however, the logging output goes to standard output instead (because
when debugging, that information changes from a side effect to the
thing you actually wanted in the first place :-).
An internal tweak: the logging functions now take a va_list rather
than an actual variadic argument list, so that I can pass it through
several functions.
LIFE_EXEC is already dealt with, and I forgot to take out the comment
reminding me to do it, ahem.
The LIFE_PARENT mentioned in the same comment was an idea I had but
couldn't think of a way to make it work: if you have a terminal-only
shell session in which you want to eval $(ssh-agent), then it's
annoying and fragile to have to remember to kill the agent when you
log out, so you'd like it to automatically tie its lifetime to that of
the shell from which you invoked it. Unfortunately, I don't know of
any way to do that without race conditions. (E.g. if only pageant
didn't fork, then it could poll its own ppid until it became 1 - but
the child process would find it was 1 already.)
This is much more like ssh-agent than the Windows version is - it sets
SSH_AUTH_SOCK and SSH_AGENT_PID as its means of being found by other
processes, rather than Windows Pageant's approach of establishing
itself in a well-known location. But the actual agent code is the same
as Windows Pageant.
For the moment, this is an experimental utility and I don't expect it
to be useful to many people; its immediate use to me is that it
provides a way to test and debug the agent code on Unix, and also to
use the agent interface as a convenient way to exercise public key
functions I want to debug. And of course it means I can be constantly
using and testing my own code, on whatever platform I happen to be
using. In the further future, I have a list of possible features I
might add to it, but I don't know which ones I'll decide are
worthwhile.
One feature I've already put in is a wider range of lifetime
management options than ssh-agent: the -X mode causes Pageant to make
a connection to your X display, and automatically terminate when that
connection closes, so that it has the same lifetime as your X session
without having to do the cumbersome trick of exec()ing the subsequent
session-management process.
