Bug 1529 - Need a method to add new configuration options in a backwards-compatible fashion (avoiding "Bad configuration option")
Summary: Need a method to add new configuration options in a backwards-compatible fash...
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE of bug 866
Alias: None
Product: Portable OpenSSH
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Miscellaneous (show other bugs)
Version: 5.1p1
Hardware: All All
: P2 normal
Assignee: Assigned to nobody
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2008-10-03 10:25 AEST by nectar
Modified: 2015-08-11 23:04 AEST (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:


Attachments

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
Description nectar 2008-10-03 10:25:12 AEST
Currently the OpenSSH configuration options parser terminates when an unknown configuration option is encountered.  For example, OpenSSH implementations without Simon Wilkinson's Kerberos support patch will choke on user’s ssh_config files that contain Kerberos options.  This can be problematic for heterogenous environments, where configuration files might be shared (e.g. network home directory).

Another example are new extensions.  OpenSSH now has some platform-independent keychain support (although the only implementation is currently on Mac OS X).  There is no option to disable that support for certain hosts or globally.  Such an option cannot be added without making it impossible to share an ssh_config with older versions of OpenSSH or platforms without keychain support.
Comment 1 nectar 2008-10-03 10:35:33 AEST
Perhaps there should be some way to annotate “non-critical“ options that would not cause OpenSSH to barf if they were not understood, or a way to annotate minimum version required.  Folks who do not share configuration files can ignore the existence of such annotations.
Comment 2 Damien Miller 2015-05-01 15:03:19 AEST
There has been an IgnoreUnknown option in ssh_config for a while. E.g. you can stick something like this at the start of ~/.ssh/config:

IgnoreUnknown GSSAPI*

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 866 ***
Comment 3 Damien Miller 2015-08-11 23:04:32 AEST
Set all RESOLVED bugs to CLOSED with release of OpenSSH 7.1