Re: Ange-FTP integration

[Kai Großjohann]

Michael Albinus <address@hidden> writes:

> - Ange-FTP has been interconnected heavily with Tramp. This was not a
>   clean interface, and it was a burden to possibly integrate EFS. I
>   have no idea whether EFS will cooperate ever with Tramp; but from
>   the interface point of view it will be simpler now.

If people would like to see what's involved in cooperating with EFS,
I suggest to check out to a version that has the old filename format
and then to search for the string "efs".  That should turn up all the
cases, I think.

(With old format, I mean the one before I used the square brackets.
I think it was /r:address@hidden:/path/to/file, but I'm not sure.
The "/r:" part is literal, the others are variable, of course.)

If you do that you will see that EFS was called from some other
hooks, too, in addition to just filename-handler-alist.

In addition to the above, the following is what I remember about
XEmacs integration:

* XEmacs has this package mechanism.  EFS is included in the core
  XEmacs to fetch further packages.  This has a number of
  implications:

* Whatever filenames are currently used to refer to the packages,
  these filenames need to continue to invoke EFS.  So the default
  method needs to be "ftp" for these filenames.

* It would not be good if it was necessary to include Tramp in the
  core XEmacs just to fetch packages.  So it would be useful if it was
  sufficient to just include tramp-ftp.el.  (My previous idea about
  this was to make it so that when Tramp is loaded, EFS is removed
  from file-name-handler-alist and all the other places.  Then the
  core XEmacs does not have to be changed at all, and when Tramp is
  installed and loaded, file-name-handler-alist and the other hooks
  change to invoke it.  But this approach is not very clean.)

Another thing is that the XEmacs developers are thinking about
including a stripped-down version of wget in the C code of XEmacs.
Then they could presumably use that to fetch the packages, so the
whole issue of making sure to invoke EFS would go away.  But I don't
know what's the status there.

kai
-- 
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