Re: Recommend move eshell/su and eshell/sudo to em-tramp.el

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

John Wiegley <johnw@newartisans.com> writes:

Hi John,

looks like it is the same message you have sent some days ago. Are there
changes I haven't seen? Anyway ...

> Something I've noticed after moving to Emacs 24 is that using "sudo" in Eshell
> has become an awful experience:
>
>     - It's *much* slower than *sudo (by orders of magnitude)

In a first reaction I've said this doesn't happen if default-directory
is local. This is wrong, I did oversee that I had defined an alias as
metioned in (info "(eshell) Built-ins")

alias sudo '*sudo $*'

Would such an alias serve you better?

>     - It doesn't show any output until the command is done

I'm working on this. Hopefully, I could change the behaviour when the
command is an external command. If the command is mapped to a lisp
function (like the command "ls" to "eshell/ls"), I have no clue how to
achieve this. The latter case happens also for Lisp code not using
Tramp, but there are shorter delays.

>     - It locks up Emacs until the command is done

If the command runs lisp code, you could interrupt with ^G as usual. For
external commands it is more complicate, because I don't know how to
propagate signals to such remote processes in Tramp. The only idea I
have is to interrupt the Tramp connection itself, which sounds like a
sledge-hammer approach.

> I do not believe these should not have been made the default.  I recommend
> moving them out of em-unix.el and into a new module, em-tramp.el, which is OFF
> by default.  Users who prefer to use Tramp for everything can turn it on, and
> a note to that effect should be added to the Tramp manual.

Would it be sufficient to propagate the above mentioned alias more
prominently? Or shall we make that alias the default?

> John

Best regards, Michael.