Woohoo! Well less than 24 hours ago I decided to bite the bullet and make a real ssh-agent solution for Mac OS X. I'm pleased to announce its completion.</ p>
I probably should make up a little project page on here... anyway, the problem was that ssh-agents could be started in individual terminal windows, but when a new window is created, the information wouldn't carry over. There have been a few scripts to deal with this, I invented my own and used it for a while, but this is what's really been needed all along.
The problem is detailed in Radar 2575100
So it took a lot longer to make than it should have, mostly from silly mistakes on my part. For example calling kill() with the arguments transposed, and figuring out to call kill() in the first place... but luckily I had iPod to keep me company...and a chorus of crickets...
Pretty soon I'll see if i can get a GUIfied ssh-add going. Perhaps one that reads passphrases out of the keychain which is unlocked right after login.
Now that I've reverse-engineered the loginPlugin API, I've got some other ideas that I'm going to work on... mostly to do with setting environment variables; probably I'll read them out of a plist that can be modified via the SystemPreferences...and I think there are some new docs out on that API, so I'm all set.