bug#64401: 28.1; Desktop restoration

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>
> Cc: Tom Hunt <tom@tomhunt.email>,  64401@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2023 10:29:37 +0200
> 
> > Michael, does Tramp have optional behavior which would abandon attempt
> > to visit a file if it takes more than some predefined time?
> 
> No, there isn't. And we cannot implement it for visiting files, because
> we don't know what would be an acceptable time period for visiting. There
> might be extremely huge files people try to visit over a slow connection.
> 
> But what about extending the semantics of `access-file'? It should
> timeout after a given predefined time. The problem is how to find out
> this timeout value. For remote files, it depends on the quality of
> connection (and perhaps on the performance of the remote machine / file
> system), so we must make it configurable, with reasonable defaults.

Something like that would be useful, yes.

> This timeout might be even useful for local files. Think about hanging
> mount points and alike.

That could be trickier to implement, since AFAIR we call C APIs for
that.