[ this mail is crossposted, keep discussions on the libcurl list please ]

Back in January, no less than 70% of the participants in the libcurl
questionnaire answered that they would like to see libcurl support SSH-based
transfers:

        http://curl.haxx.se/q/analysis.html#newprotocols

Due to the overwhelming amount of people wanting this, I have seriously been
looking into what this would mean and require on our behalf.

I am prepared to create and take part in a working-group in order to develop
support for "native" file transfers over SSH (the protocol, not the tool) at
least using version 2 of the protocol.

I think a sensible approach would be to:

1. Setup a work-group. This is much work. I'd need help and support from a
   bunch of interested persons.

2. Research what there is already in the form of libraries and APIs available
   that we might be able to use as-is (and possibly just improve/adjust).

3. Investigate OpenSSH and see if it offers an API, or what it would take for
   us to make one, changing as little as possible and re-using their source
   code as much as we can.

4. Finally, and probably not very difficult: add code to libcurl that uses
   this SSH API when it is available (in a similar fashion that we use SSL
   conditionally today).

This said, there is of course no time frame for this.

-- 
    Daniel Stenberg -- curl groks URLs -- http://curl.haxx.se/