[Texmacs-dev] Launching computer algebra sessions via ssh

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi all,

I noticed an interesting possibility with our pipe-based plug-in mechanism
for remote execution of computer algebra sessions. First configure
your ssh so that you can login on the remote machine without being
prompted for a password (for instance, but using RSA identification).
After that, simply modify the line for launching the plug-in
to use ssh instead. For instance, in the case of Pari-GP, this yields

  (:launch "ssh -o BatchMode=true address@hidden gp --texmacs")

instead of

  (:launch "gp --texmacs")

(question: should we also set the escape character to none?)
You may also have to set

  (:require #t)

instead of

  (:require (url-exists-in-path? "gp"))

if gp is not available at your local system. The next thing I am
wondering about is whether we should automatically support this mechanism
inside TeXamcs. Of course, this raises a few questions:

1) What kind of interface would we like?
2) How to determine (efficiently) whether a given plug-in works in
   this more general setting?
3) Would we also like to be able to execute remote plug-ins?
   I.e.: someone writes a TeXmacs plug-in which works correctly on
   some machine. Now we would like to remotedly test this plug-in
   from another machine which runs TeXmacs.

What do you think?

--Joris