bug#4004: filename completion

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

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

[added emacs-devel, we shall continue to discuss there]

>> I must check the code, but IIRC partial-completion-mode is just an
>> indication for Tramp whether some file name completion functionality
>> shall be enabled, before Tramp is fully loaded. There were people who
>> disliked Tramp's file name completion.
>
> Then this needs to be fixed.  Looking at the code, I can't quite
> understand what it does: it seems that Tramp's method/user/host
> completion is only activated for people you use either
> partial-completion-mode, ido, icycle, or XEmacs.  I'm not sure what's
> the logic behind it, but I'd rather just activate it based on a specific
> configuration variable (or just always activate it, as you do in
> XEmacs).  In Emacs-23, the functionality that was previous offered by
> partial-completion-mode is enabled by default (tho implemented
> differently and activated differently as well).

There was a discussion about some years ago, when I did add Tramp's
autoloads. People were annoyed, that even after typing something like
"/a" in the minibuffer, Tramp was already loaded, which raised some
delays. So it was suggested to make Tramp's autoloading optional. It was
even requested that this "optionality" should not be something, which
the user has to disnable herself; users should not be bashed by a new
feature they are not interested in.

The compromise was to find indications, were it could be expected that
the user would appreciate Tramp. partial-completion-mode was the first
candidate, ido and icycle were added later. The XEmacs case is
different, because there is another syntax for Tramp.

If partial-completion-mode is discarded in Emacs, we should either find
a replacement for this "indication", or we shall decide, that Tramp *is*
always loaded as soon as somebody writes an absolute filename in the
minibuffer.

The check for partial-completion-mode shall remain in tramp.el, for
backward compatibility.

>         Stefan

Best regards, Michael.