rsyncing as root when root login is disabled?

[Matt McCutchen]

It occurs to me: sudo tries to do the right thing by reading the
password from /dev/tty.  If a natural enhancement were made to SSH,
the right thing would happen.  When the SSH client has a controlling
terminal but its stdin and stdout are not connected to that terminal,
the server should give the remotely executed process a controlling
terminal in addition to stdin and stdout.  The server should forward
reads and writes of this terminal to the SSH client's controlling
terminal.

I think I will propose this enhancement on the OpenSSH mailing list.
It would fix --rsh="ssh middle ssh" as well as --rsync-path="sudo
rsync".

Matt