Current Tramp plans

[Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)]

There has been a lot of discussion regarding Tramp.  I would like to
thank all participants for their thoughtful comments.

My summary of the situation:

* The longterm goal is to unify the Tramp and Ange-FTP filenames, and
  to use a format for the filenames which is a superset of the
  Ange-FTP format.

* The Ange-FTP entries are deleted from file-name-handler-alist.

* In certain cases, Tramp forwards the file operations to Ange-FTP.
  These cases include:
  - ftp is explicitly mentioned in the filename
  - the user has said to always use ftp for certain user/host
    combinations
  Additionally, we might want to default to ftp in some cases, such
  as when the user is anonymous.

* Different people have different opinions on what the new format
  should look like.  Proposals for the non-multi case that seem to be
  still in the competition:

  Richard:
    /user@host@method:file
      empty strings for omitted/defaulted components, eg
        /@host@method:file

  Miles (?)
    /user@host#method:file
      numeric methods would be considered ports for ftp

  Kai:
    /[method]user@host:file
      Because I really doubt that square brackets in the user
      name are actually needed.
      And if they are needed, people can just say something like
      /[sm][xx]yy@zz:file
      This will use the sm method, connect to host zz, and use
      the user name "[xx]yy".
      Since square brackets are quite rare, I don't think
      it matters that people have to type a slightly longer
      filename in this case.
    /method#user@host:file
      because `#' is already used by Ange-FTP as a special character

  If there is more than one colon before the first slash, then we
  know that it must be a multi-hop method.  Hence, the colon can be
  reused as a separator between hops.

I would like to proceed in a step-by-step fashion:

* First, I want to make it so that Tramp can forward requests to
  Ange-FTP.

* Then I need to have Tramp accept the port number for the Ange-FTP
  case.

* Then comes an Ange-FTP-like filename format for the non-multi
  methods.

* Then comes a new format for the multi-hop filenames.

kai
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