Re: Shipping non-OpenSSH scp(1) binary
On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 11:27:44PM +0200, Guilhem Moulin wrote:
> /usr/bin/scp — used both client and server side — is currently provided
> by the openssh-client package. I'm currently maintaining dropbear,
> which happens to also provide scp; it's currently not included in our
> packages, but users have repeatedly requested it [0] and I'm wondering
> what would be the best way to provide it.
>
> Quoting myself from bug #495795 msg #25,
>
> --8<--------------------------------------------------------------->8--
>
> I believe the options at hands are:
>
> * ask the OpenSSH maintainers to consider using an alternative for
> their scp binary (and possibly ssh too), or
> * provide a new package dropbear-client to ship /usr/bin/{dbclient,scp}
> and make it conflict with openssh-client.
>
> Any thoughts or suggestions?
>
> --8<--------------------------------------------------------------->8--
>
> I'm currently leaning towards the second solution, but would be great to
> have your opinion on that :-)
I think it would be pretty disruptive to use alternatives (I'm sure the
feature set won't match up absolutely precisely), so I'm not
enthusiastic about that idea. And I'm a bit concerned about Conflicts
possibly painting us into a corner in future.
Can you tell me about the scp implementation in dropbear? For instance,
does it differ meaningfully from OpenSSH's scp apart from being set up
to use the dropbear client for the actual SSH protocol?
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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