bug#64401: 28.1; Desktop restoration

[Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

Hi Eli,

>> The problem isn't at save time, it's at restore time. The issue is
>> that, if a saved remote file isn't reachable, it hangs the whole
>> restore. Ideally, an unreachable saved file would just be skipped
>> over (at restore time) and the rest of the session restored.
>
> I don't understand how this could be done, given that discovery of
> inaccessible files is done by trying to access them.  If you can think
> about design of this, maybe we could implement such a feature.
>
> 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.

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

Best regards, Michael.