[distcc] Proposed Enhancements/Changes

[Ian BAKER]

Thank you to everyone for the feedback, I should have perhaps stated in my 
original message that these proposals are in draft form and can change in 
light of feedback from this list.


 	"Have you considered using ssh mode for user authentication?"

For our setup it makes sense to use the GSS-API sitting on top of our 
existing Kerberos security mechanism, we expect this to be faster than SSH 
and has the additional benefits of being transparent to our users and 
circumvents having to specify the users that can access the hosts.



 	"That sounds like a good idea. But I would like to hear more
 	 about the details."

Essentially, we are planning to implement specific build platforms and 
would use existing Zeroconf functionality to advertise them in order 
to allow for targeted builds.



 	"Although I wonder whether maybe it should go in DISTCC_HOSTS
 	 rather than in a command line option?"

Taking that option off the command line and putting it into DISTCC_HOSTS 
sounds like a good idea.



 	"Sounds reasonable, assuming that this is a separate component
 	 that is not tightly coupled to the distcc client and server
 	 (e.g. it should be optional)."

Agreed.  The monitoring/accounting component would indeed be loosely 
coupled to the distcc client and server, not least to prevent any failures 
it may suffer from disrupting the build cluster.  This additional 
component would simply extract log files and wouldn't require any changes 
to distcc or distccd.

It is part of our design criteria that any changes that we make to the 
code base will be entirely optional and will be disabled out of the box.

Thanks

Ian