Here are some things which might be done in the future or have been
recently tried. 

1. Parse the DISPLAY environment variable without forking any extra
processes like sed.  Perhaps use IFS in the shell.
<done, but doesn't work in Ultrix /bin/sh>

2. Pass other environment variables besides $DISPLAY.  Users might
want to pass an arbitrary set.
<can now pass XAUTHORITY using XRSH_AUTH_TYPE and arbitrary
  environment variables using XRSH_ENVS_TO_PASS>

3. Don't use backslashes for quoting, only  use only ' and " for portability.
<What hosts don't handle backslashes?  This turns out to be very hard.>

4. Pass  $XUSERFILESEARCHPATH to the remote host?
<I'm not sure this is always what you want to do, but you can
  do it if you want to using XRSH_ENVS_TO_PASS.>

5. Add command line flag to describe the remote machine (like -sysv or
-irix).  This would get all the config options correct without having
to guess.
<I hope not to have to do this -- I hope to make the one script portable.>

6. If you have to rsh the xhost to the serverhost, run it in the
     background and use wait before the final rsh to improve speed.
<I did this, but it made some system V hosts (HP-UX 7.0) go insane and
say "wait: pid 232 is not a child of this shell" over and over again.
I finally deleted it in the interests of portability.  Timing showed
it wasn't a major win in speed anyway>

7. Expand DISPLAY environment variable  from foo to foo.org.com so
that it works when you leave your local site.
<hard to do in a site independent manner.  Now uses ip addresses if the 
remote host name contains periods like foo.bar.com>

8. Decide rsh vs. remsh vs. rcmd at install time instead of run time.
<disadvantage:  one script can't be transferred from one machine to another>

9. make first line be : instead of #!
<Can't -- without #! some systems use $SHELL to eval scripts.  May not
be the right thing>

10. Use IP address when setting $DISPLAY for remote hosts that can't
resolve local hostname.
<This is done for remote host names with . in them>

11. Have an .xrsh.rc file which can be used to tailor defaults for
specific hosts.
