Just now realized that the slave installers only work if the inbound agent is launched in “GUI” mode, which is only available when using javaws, which is semi-deprecated and might be dropped altogether if we decline to keep signing remoting.jar. (Anyway they are only useful if the user account launching the agent has administrator privileges to register a service.) So while slave-installer and its four implementations can still be trivially converted to plugins, we may decide to stop bundling them, meaning that we would be down to three detached plugins (instance-identity, ssh-cli-auth, sshd), which might ease some of the objections to this change.

jglickoleg_nenashev I recently started thinking to bump the Apache Mina to 2.5.x version on the SSHD module, doing it, I have found several works in progress related to this module, the bum of the library JENKINS-60902, and this one about converting the module in a plugin. After thinking deeply about it I think that we have to move it first to plugin and then bump the version of the library. So, If you do not have any objection, I'd like to take ownership of move SSHD module to a plugin, I have made one of those in the past wit the trilead-ssh2.

I was actually thinking about resurrecting this effort and filing a JEP with the updated proposal. One change from the initial proposal would be to inline ssh-cli-auth into sshd. ifernandezcalvo Do you mind waiting a day or two for me to file a JEP draft so we have a baseline for discussion? It should be possible to separate the actual work and do it in stages, so it would be perfect if you wanted to handle the SSH-related portions, since you have the detailed knowledge of associated issues.

sure, there is no rush.

I filed jep #326 to both formalize this change and reflect changes to my original proposal.