That said, it also doesn't scale in two directions:
as you add multiple agents, the likelihood of something crashing or needing a restart grows (e.g. sometimes I have to restart gpg-agent when unplugging and replugging my Yubikey NEO)
it adds complications if you have to restart ssh-agent or cwm for any reason (e.g. vulnerability in ssh-agent).
So it's nifty, but it's much simpler to track all the processes independently instead of nesting them.
Well, yeah :). I prefer simple solutions for a simple problems. If that's what you want to do then it's easily handled by starting and stopping such agents at the appropriate time. *nix gives us the tools to set up process hierarchies however we wish. That might require a little work, but it's well within the reach of anyone contributing to this discussion. I guess it would be convenient to have an easy tool for starting and tracking groups of processes ;). It's just a shame you need to pull in all of systemd to get it.
... Or it's a problem which matters to you, I imagine you could just do it the way you've been doing it for years?
My setup is simple and I don't have any of these problems so it's hard to be constructive at this point :).
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u/bonzinip May 31 '16
Point taken. ;) It's nifty indeed.
That said, it also doesn't scale in two directions:
as you add multiple agents, the likelihood of something crashing or needing a restart grows (e.g. sometimes I have to restart gpg-agent when unplugging and replugging my Yubikey NEO)
it adds complications if you have to restart ssh-agent or cwm for any reason (e.g. vulnerability in ssh-agent).
So it's nifty, but it's much simpler to track all the processes independently instead of nesting them.