Features

Distant supports multiple backends to facilitate remote communication with another server. Today, these backends include:

  • distant: a standalone server acting as the reference implementation.
  • ssh: a wrapper around an ssh client that translates the distant protocol into ssh server requests.

Not every backend supports every feature of distant. Below is a table outlining the available features and which backend supports each feature:

Feature distant ssh
Filesystem I/O 1 ✅ ✅
Filesystem Watching 2 ✅ ❌
Process Execution 3 ✅ ✅
Reconnect 4 ✅ ❌
Search 5 ✅ ❌
System Information 6 ✅ ⚠

  1. able to read from and write to the filesystem. ↩

  2. able to receive notifications when changes to the filesystem occur. ↩

  3. able to execute processes. ↩

  4. able to reconnect after network outages. ↩

  5. able to search the filesystem. ↩

  6. able to retrieve information about the system. ↩