Re: Remote process attributes

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>
> Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2022 12:59:22 +0200
> 
> Triggered by the recent changes in proced.el, I've played a little bit
> in order to see whether proced could also show remote processes. After
> all, it is really simple:
> 
> - list-system-processes and process-attributes shall return process
>   information of the remote host when default-directory is remote.

Is it really certain that the default-directory being remote is
evidence significant enough that the user wants to list remote
processes?  Processes aren't files, and aren't even related to files
like programs (whose executable files are looked up before we run
them).

> A problem could be to find the proper arguments for ps. I've used a
> default setting for GNU/Linux, other systems could apply
> connection-local variables for that. My proof-of-concept implementation
> offers such settings for the Tramp adb method as well as for remote
> (Free)BSD systems and ps implementations based on Busybox. That are the
> test cases I could run locally.

As mentioned in that thread, there are several ps implementations, and
they differ in what they accept and how they report various
attributes.  We switched to our own implementation to avoid the
problems we had using ps.  Now these problems will be back.  I
envision trouble.