[peterwwillis]

It seems a little risky to assume separate clients/platforms will always interpret command line arguments the same way. At some point when a client breaks compatibility you have to implement methods to support the one-offs, or drop support. So for portability's sake, why not start writing those methods now, and have a generic universal method to fall back on for untested clients/versions?

Or is that really unnecessary?

[avar]

How would a program like git figure out what flavor of "ssh" program is on the system? Keep in mind that it may change while a long-running git command is running.