Re: remote hosting

[Pascal Bourguignon]

Richard Frith-Macdonald <address@hidden>
> 
> I've just added remote hosting support (like OPENSTEP/NeXTstep had) 
> using -NSHost
> [...]
> Two issues arising from recent discussions on the mailing list -
>
> 1. X systems can have multiple 'displays' (each  display consisting
>    or a  keyboard, a mouse, and one or more screens), but the NSHost
>    mechanism presumes  that a host is a workstation with a single
>    user.
> 
> Should we implement some extension to -NSHost to allow for this?

When using  a X back-end,  the environment variable  DISPLAY specifies
the host, the display and the (default) screen.

     DISPLAY=${HOST}:${DISPLAY}.${SCREEN}

The  argument of  -NSHost  should  accept a  syntax  depending on  the
current  back-end. With  intelligent defaults,  it may  accept similar
expressions whatever the back-end. But in anycase, it appears that the
interpretation of its argument is back-end specific.

So, for the X back-ends, we could have:

    -NSHost   [host]:display[.screen] | host[:display[.screen]]

When host is  not specified, a X server on the  localhost is used. But
be  careful  :  X connects  thru  the  unix-sockets  when no  host  is
specified, but thru the network lo0 when localhost is specified.

When no display is specified, :0 should be used by default.


> 2. X systems can be dumb machines without GNUstep running, so would not 
> run the pasteboard, notification centre, and workspace processes
> 
> Should we implement some mechanism whereby some other GNUstep machine 
> could run the required processes on behalf of the dumb X terminal?

That's to  avoid that  kind of problems  that I  propose to use  the X
clipboard instead  of a GNUstep  specific pasteboard server.  At least
with  the X  clipboard  we have  a  similar service  to implement  our
pasteboard.

We sill have to resolve the cases of notification centre and workspace
processes.


I'm  afraid  a good  solution  will  involve  configuration files  (or
default entries). Hey, by the way, what about the defaults database?

[here-host]$ dwrite MyApp MyDefault Value
[here-host]$ ssh remote-host Apps/MyApp.app/MyApp -NSHost here-host
 
> My provisional thoughts are that these issues are probably not worth 
> bothering about right now, but I thought I'd let you think about them.


-- 
__Pascal_Bourguignon__              (o_ Software patents are endangering
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