[ANN] Net::SSH 0.0.5

[Jamis Buck]

Net::SSH 0.0.5 is now available! (Yes, this comes hard on the heels of
0.0.4, but I'm going out of town for a week and a half and figured I
should release the work that has been done in the last few days, since
it was significant.)

Net::SSH is a pure-Ruby implementation of an SSH2 client. It may be
obtained at:

http://rubyforge.org/projects/net-ssh

The complete (!) users manual and API documentation may be read at:

http://net-ssh.rubyforge.org
http://net-ssh.rubyforge.org/api

Version 0.0.5 adds the much-anticipated SSH agent support, but (alas)
only on Unix-ish systems. (The PuTTY "pageant" agent is sufficiently
different from the OpenSSH ssh-agent utility that it will require a
pretty bit of work to interface with... any takers?)

This version also provides an "rb-keygen" command-line utility for
generating keys. It mirrors a subset of the functionality of
"ssh-keygen", so if you've got ssh-keygen available, you might as well
use it for generating keys. If you don't, you can use rb-keygen instead.

One particularly significant bug fix was suggested by Daniel Hobe: in
0.0.4 and earlier, all of a user's private keys were loaded at startup
time, which meant that if the keys were protected by passphrases, the
user had to enter those passphrases for all keys up front, even if none
of the keys were ever used. This was annoying. Now, key loading is
delayed until the key is actually needed, so you never need to enter a
passphrase for a private key unless it is actually going to be used.

Various other improvements and fixes have been added as well--see the
ChangeLog for the complete list. Also, don't forget to read the users
manual--all planned chapters have been drafted, and I'm just awaiting
comments. (Thanks to those of you that have submitted comments on the
documentation already--they've helped a ton.)

Special thanks for this release go to Daniel Hobe, without whose
suggestions, comments, encouragement, and patches this release would not
be nearly as slick.

(I think we may be getting close to a 0.1 release!)

--
Jamis Buck
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis

"I use octal until I get to 8, and then I switch to decimal."

 

[Carl Youngblood]

Do you really mean "pure ruby"? I thought that ruby relied on OpenSSL
C code to do a lot of its stuff.

 

[Austin Ziegler]

Do you really mean "pure ruby"? I thought that ruby relied on OpenSSL
C code to do a lot of its stuff.

In the sense that Jamis has written no C code that requires
compilation by an end-user, he means "pure ruby." OpenSSL is a
"standard extension" built and delivered with Ruby itself, and
therefore can be considered part of the "core."

-austin

 

[Jamis Buck]

Do you really mean "pure ruby"? I thought that ruby relied on OpenSSL
C code to do a lot of its stuff.

I do mean pure Ruby. The Net::SSH stuff is all Ruby. Yes, it has
dependencies on other libraries that are not pure Ruby, but Net::SSH
itself consists of only Ruby code. I mean, if you get nit-picky enough,
no Ruby library is "pure-Ruby", since Array, Hash, String, and the like
are all implemented in C.

Also, since "openssl" is one of the standard Ruby libraries, it's not as
onerous a depenency as it could be.

- Jamis

.

--
Jamis Buck
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis

"I use octal until I get to 8, and then I switch to decimal."

 

[Carl Youngblood]

Okay, thanks for the clarification.

I do mean pure Ruby. The Net::SSH stuff is all Ruby. Yes, it has
dependencies on other libraries that are not pure Ruby, but Net::SSH
itself consists of only Ruby code. I mean, if you get nit-picky enough,
no Ruby library is "pure-Ruby", since Array, Hash, String, and the like
are all implemented in C.

Also, since "openssl" is one of the standard Ruby libraries, it's not as
onerous a depenency as it could be.

- Jamis




--
Jamis Buck
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.jamisbuck.org/jamis

"I use octal until I get to 8, and then I switch to decimal."