remote hosting

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

I've just added remote hosting support (like OPENSTEP/NeXTstep had) 
using -NSHost

Modified NSPasteboard to refrain from trying to launch a local 
pasteboard server
when given a remote host, and to contact the remote pasteboard server.

Modified NSDistributedNotificationCentre likewise, so workspace 
notifications should
be based on the host an app is displaying to.

Modified NSWorkspacce to connect to the workspace application on the 
remote host, and
to launch applications so they will display on that host.

Modified the xgps backend to understand  -NSHost and try to connect to 
the default
display on that host.  Also, if NSHost is not set up, but the X DISPLAY 
environment
variable is, the backend code will generate an NSHost user default to 
reflect the
contents of DISPLAY so other parts of the system should know about it.
I'm leaving a similar mod for xdps until I'm fairly sure this stuff is 
stable.


Testing has  been extremely minimal ... I'm away from hope and operating 
on my laptop,
so network testing is a bit tricky.


Two issues arising from recent discussions on the mailing list -
1. X systems can have multiple 'displays' (each  display consisting or a 
keyboard,
a mouse, and one or more screens), but the NSHost mechanism presumes 
that a host is
a workstation with a single user.

Should we implement some extension to -NSHost to allow for this?

2. X systems can be dumb machines without GNUstep running, so would not 
run the
pasteboard, notification centre, and workspace processes

Should we implement some mechanism whereby some other GNUstep machine 
could run
the required processes on behalf of the dumb X terminal?


My provisional thoughts are that these issues are probably not worth 
bothering
about right now, but I thought I'd let you think about them.