Re: A Modest Proposal

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 04 May 2016 09:51:52 +0100
> 
> On Tue 03 May 2016, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> 
> > AFAIK ls-lisp is implemented with functions that are also handled by
> > Tramp, so it should work just as well.
> 
> Except for platforms where ls-lisp does not understand the underlying
> file system in the same way as the external tool.

ls-lisp understands the underlying filesystem as well as Emacs does.

> For example, on windows the permissions from ls-lisp are fairly
> meaningless

No, they are not meaningless.  I wonder why you say that.

> and do not match what is reported from MSYS, MSYS2 or Cygwin
> versions of ls

Why should they match?  Cygwin emulates Posix user/group/world
permissions using NTFS security features, and in particular encodes
the Posix attribute bits in Windows ACEs using its own private scheme.
There's no reason to expect native calls to match that scheme.

> Please keep things the way they are.

Not sure why do you say that.  If you mean that you'd like to have use
Cygwin/MSYS 'ls' from a native Emacs, then I don't recommend that, due
to the above-mentioned mismatches.  You could have a file listed as
inaccessible, which actually is, or vice versa.  Why is that a good
idea?