eshell and after-change-functions

[Jan Moringen <jan.moringen@uni-bielefeld.de>]

Hi,

while working on a new feature for Rudel (an environment for realtime
collaborative editing in Emacs, [1]), I encountered a problem that has
its root cause in some eshell code, which I can't understand. 

The feature in question is sharing interactive buffers like comint,
slime and, well, eshell with other users. The problem is that Rudel
relies on `after-change-functions' to monitor buffer changes and
propagate them to peers, but eshell let-binds this variable to nil in
`eshell-send-input' and `eshell-output-filter'. This prevents buffer
changes performed in these functions from being propagated and
de-synchronizes the session. I cannot find a specific reason for
disabling all after-change functions in the ehsell code and was
wondering if somebody knows why this is necessary. If it is not
necessary, could this maybe be changed?

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,
Jan

[1] http://rudel.sourceforge.net