[Parti-discuss] xpra != ssh X forwarding :-(

[Brian J. Murrell]

On Fri, 2009-04-03 at 12:33 -0700, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> 
> Sure. Xpra scratches an itch for me, and hopefully for other people
> too.

Indeed.

>  But I won't be offended if you have different itches :-).

:-)

> Really? Wow.

Yeah.  It's really quite neat how transparent it is.  It just works.

> We could support this somehow I'm sure, though it's not
> obvious to me what the best way is.

Well, one can specifically point to their "local machine" with an env.
var., but then it loses its "just works" MO.

> With some work, we could spawn a
> pulseaudio server along with Xvfb, then capture the audio sent to it
> and forward it over the xpra connection.

Yeah, that might work.

> This would be reliable, would
> take a fair amount of magic, and might not end up with very smooth
> playback if the audio data is fighting with window redraws on the
> network connection.

Hrm.  I wonder if that's any more unfair than competing with the draws
that are happening over the ssh session (for the non-Xpra use-case)
anyway.  Meaning it's probably the same fight and if it works in one
scenario, probably works in the other too.

> With not much work at all, we could drop a similar
> root window property into the Xvfb when we connect,

Interesting idea.

> GTK+ does some sort of magic with root window properties too, like
> pulseaudio, that I don't entirely understand. I would be happy to have
> the client just send those over when it connects (I would love this
> feature myself); it just needs someone to figure out what weird
> undocumented mechanism GTK+ is using to do this. (I assume you're
> using GTK+.

I am.

> ssh agent forwarding is tough

Indeed.

> The solution would probably be to write a proxying ssh agent, just
> like xpra proxies the X connection. This is actually less work than
> one might think (the ssh agent protocol is very simple, and allows for
> all kinds of cool hacks), but making the UI simple is tough -- xpra
> could arrange for any programs *it spawns* to have access to the
> special proxying agent, but it has no control over programs you start
> directly with 'foo --display :100'.

Right.

> We can write code to do whatever we want. It's just a question of
> going through different features and doing some work for each of them,
> and finding the time/manpower to do it.

Yes, indeed.  The kicker every time.  :-)

I guess I wanted to a) express my findings and b) see what your
receptiveness to them was.  If/when they happen, they happen.

Cheers, and thanx for the great work that Xpra is already!

b.

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