Re: improving network utility calls in lisp/net/net-utils.el

[Chad Brown]

I suspect it comes down to usage patterns, but if something is wrong  
(network-wise), then the following two things happen:

a) people are more likely to want to use the commands
b) the commands are more likely to hang, be slow, etc.

In particular, it's really not hard to get into a situation where dns  
name resolution will fail, but won't give up for a couple minutes.   
Nobody wants emacs to hang for two minutes to tell them that  
something's broken, especially when they were originally asking  
because something looked to be broken.

Back when I had to care about such things professionally, I took to  
using a program called mtr to check on such situations.  I would have  
preferred to use something built into emacs, until the first time it  
made emacs hang.  Put another way, my former self would have been  
quite happy to see your proposal as long as it didn't require  
synchronized processes.  I imagine that there are still quite a few  
people in my former boat, so don't get discouraged.  It shouldn't be  
hard to made it work with an async process, and afterward you will  
have learned (assuming you don't already know) something cool about  
emacs.

Regardless, thanks for your efforts to improve emacs.
*chad