[distcc] A Few Ideas

[ibaker at mail.cern.ch]

Good evening, I would appreciate any feedback on the following.

Our initial patch submission for implementing GSS-API mutual authentication 
used an environment variable ($DISTCC_AUTH) and as such was a global 
option for all hosts.

We have another version where this is now a per host option along the 
lines of lzo or cpp (,gssapi).  This enables a client to use mixed 
authenticating/non-authenticating build hosts, and allows for easier 
deployment for users as there are fewer environment variables to set up.

We also currently use DNS aliases to identify a build cluster or 
sub-cluster and replace its host definition with a host definition for 
each of its IP addresses if the host option of ,exp is specified (this is 
to avoid a performance cap imposed by the lockfile names and to utilise 
the randomisation done by DNS).

These modifications involve extending the host definition structure and 
the host option parser, so in this respect they're slightly more 
intrusive in terms of code modification.  However, this approach is 
consistent with the existing per host comma separated options.

Would this be an acceptable solution, or can anyone foresee any issues or 
problems?


Thanks.

Ian