Comment # 6 on bug 1088564 from Fabian Vogt

(In reply to Neil Rickert from comment #5)
> I'm not quite sure what you are asking.
> 
> ssh-agent has always been started for KDE and other desktops.
> 
> When Gnome first became available on Wayland, that had the same problem.  It
> is now corrected, but I think that uses seahorse.
> 
> The KaOS distro does start ssh-agent on Wayland session startup (perhaps
> only if ".ssh" exists in home directory.
> 
> I can manage either way, but some consistency would be useful.

The only way I'd be happy with is an actual upstream way the same on every
distro and DE. Implementing everything downstream is just a waste of time.
Can you create an upstream bug on bugs.kde.org?

> I'm currently starting from my shell startup script.  That's ".login" since
> I am a csh user.  In effect, the startup script checks whether
> $SSH_AUTH_SOCK is defined in the environment. If not defined, it uses:
>  eval `ssh-agent -c`
> to start ssh-agent.
>
> This depends on the session startup running the shell startup script. 
> Starting as a normal autostart application probably would not work, because
> that would not set the environment for the entire session.

Indeed. You'd need to put it into ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/.