For what it is worth, that explanation more or less mirrors my recollection
of why that wasn't a zero to poll, or infinite, timeout.  Working around
broken something; I would have said more likely MacOS-X of the period,
which I think still has a broken implementation of the `poll` syscall, but
I don't fully recall.

(That was still in the era I payed significant attention to TRAMP
development)



On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 1:38 PM Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>
wrote:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
> Hi Eli,
>
> >> At least the w32 version of accept-process-output was broken in the
> >> past, see the comment in tramp-accept-process-output. But this was Emacs
> >> 22 time, so hopefully it is fixed now.
> >
> > That comment doesn't tell much about the problem, so I couldn't verify
> > that the problem it mentioned is no longer relevant.
>
> Archeology has uncovered
> <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/tramp-devel/2006-12/msg00007.html>,
> which relates to that comment. Sorry, I haven't anything else.
>
> The respective commit in the Tramp repository was CVS 2.516 from
> 10-Dec-06, if that matters :-)
>
> In that message thread, the OP has mentioned another problem after I've
> added the timeout and the comment; this seems to be unrelated.
>
> Best regards, Michael.
>
>