In T137#2665, @adelton wrote:

I like the proposed wording, @Jakuje.
If the semantics get changed later, the documentation will change with it. But I'd prefer not waiting for the refactoring and just update the description now, as the first step.

That code is awfully old (probably 2004-2005). The idea was probably separating the SSH part and the SFTP parts. Today it makes little sense. Also both calls are synchronous and blocking. Your proposed patch describes well what it does today. Given the time I'd improve the actual implementation and move everything that handles network into sftp_init() and leave sftp_new() to memory allocation only like it's standard in the rest of the library.

Hi Jakub,

Closed it by mistake

cc @Jakuje, git blame says you touched that code last :)

I found this problem too when trying to set up the test environment on Ubuntu 18.04. The root cause is that the test calls the ssh binary from the fake root user. It fails because ssh can't find uid 0 in /etc/passwd, then fails because of missing known hosts keys and authentication keys. I don't know how that test could work elsewhere.
I made a patch that assumes it's running as root and create the missing keys. A better way would be to force the test cases to run as bob but I haven't found the proper way of doing this.

Thanks for your contribution!
I'll review this patch asap.

dh-gex kex was implemented and pushed to master.