Re: recentf-cleanup, file-readable-p & remote files

[David PONCE <david.ponce@wanadoo.fr>]

Hi,

> Ah, I think you misunderstood part of what I was trying to say --
> which is that `file-readable-p' can be very slow when you *are*
> connected (when I'm not connected it returns in a fraction of second,
> so that's not a problem)
>
> The reason is that that ange-ftp implements it rather inefficiently.
> Instead of just listing the file in question it lists *all* files in
> the directory.  That's a lot of data if the directory contains
> thousands of files.  In the example from my previous post doing
> `file-readable-p' is ~500 times slower than actually fetching the
> file!

OK, thank you for the explanation, I understand better now!

Could you try file-exists-p please?  Does it work better?

A possibility could be to consider that remote files are always
readable and change `recentf-file-readable-p' like this:

(defsubst recentf-file-readable-p (filename)
  "Return t if file FILENAME exists and you can read it.
Assume that remote files are always readable."
  (or (file-remote-p filename)
      (file-readable-p filename)))

Remote files then could be manually removed from the recent list (M-x
recentf-edit-list), or will be removed naturally by the LRU mechanism
if they are not accessed for a long time (see the option
`recentf-max-saved-items').

Perhaps, in your case, another acceptable workaround could be to
disable the `recentf-auto-cleanup' feature (customize this option to
`never'), and let the LRU mechanism eliminate files not accessed for a
long time.

Thoughts?

David