bug#24665: 25.1; Confusing documentation of Tramp methods

bug#24665: 25.1; Confusing documentation of Tramp methods

[Eli Zaretskii]

The Tramp manual says in the node External Methods:

  ‘scp’—‘ssh’ and ‘scp’

       Using a combination of ‘ssh’ to connect and ‘scp’ to transfer is
       the most secure.  While the performance is good, it is slower than
       the inline methods for smaller files.  Though there is no overhead
       of encoding and decoding of the inline methods, ‘scp’’s
       cryptographic handshake negates those speed gains.
  [...]

  ‘pscp’—‘plink’ and ‘pscp’
  ‘psftp’—‘plink’ and ‘psftp’

       These methods are similar to ‘scp’ or ‘sftp’, but they use the
       ‘plink’ command to connect to the remote host, and they use ‘pscp’
       or ‘psftp’ for transferring the files.  These programs are part of
       PuTTY, an SSH implementation for Windows.

This seems to say that a file name like the following should work:

  /pscp-plink:username@hostname:filename

But in reality, Tramp says 'Unknown method "pscp-plink"'.  Using just
"pscp" does work.

So it seems like the above doesn't mean to say I should use
"pscp-plink" literally.  But what _does_ it mean?  I didn't find any
clues neither in the Tramp manual nor in the doc string of
tramp-methods.


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bug#24665: 25.1; Confusing documentation of Tramp methods

[Michael Albinus]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> But in reality, Tramp says 'Unknown method "pscp-plink"'.  Using just
> "pscp" does work.
>
> So it seems like the above doesn't mean to say I should use
> "pscp-plink" literally.  But what _does_ it mean?  I didn't find any
> clues neither in the Tramp manual nor in the doc string of
> tramp-methods.

I confirm it might confuse people (though this is part of the Tramp
manual more than 15 years, longer than I am engaged with Tramp :-)

Will fix it in the master branch. The emacs-25 branch contains Tramp
2.2, which is in maintenance mode, and shall see serious bug fixes for
Tramp only.

Best regards, Michael.

bug#24665: 25.1; Confusing documentation of Tramp methods

[Michael Albinus]

Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de> writes:

>> But in reality, Tramp says 'Unknown method "pscp-plink"'.  Using just
>> "pscp" does work.
>>
>> So it seems like the above doesn't mean to say I should use
>> "pscp-plink" literally.  But what _does_ it mean?  I didn't find any
>> clues neither in the Tramp manual nor in the doc string of
>> tramp-methods.
>
> I confirm it might confuse people (though this is part of the Tramp
> manual more than 15 years, longer than I am engaged with Tramp :-)
>
> Will fix it in the master branch. The emacs-25 branch contains Tramp
> 2.2, which is in maintenance mode, and shall see serious bug fixes for
> Tramp only.

Fixed, closing the bug.

Best regards, Michael.