Re: ange-ftp and sftp?

[Phillip Lord <p.lord@cs.man.ac.uk>]

>>>>> "Miles" == Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:

  Miles> In my experience it can take tramp up to 30-40 seconds to
  Miles> open the first file on a remote machine, even over a local
  Miles> network!  Ange-ftp isn't great either, but it's faster than
  Miles> that (especially once the connection is established).  I
  Miles> expect sftp would be even faster if made to work.

  >> I'm guessing that tramp tries to abstract over the different
  >> transport mechanisms, and so can't use their features as much?

  Miles> Not really -- tramp is written for a very specific method of
  Miles> operation: it uses a user login session on the remote
  Miles> machine, doing all communication over the standard input and
  Miles> ouput channel for that login.  I think it's common to have
  Miles> remote login capabilities even when FTP doesn't work, so
  Miles> tramp might be more widely usable.

Presumably this is only true for inline methods? Things like the scp
method can't assume login capability.


  Miles> Tramp tries to make few assumptions about the availability of
  Miles> various programs on the remote machine, and doesn't assume a
  Miles> clear communications channel, so it is forced to use some
  Miles> very clunky and slow methods (for instance, it actually
  Miles> downloads various scripts to the remote machine when it first
  Miles> connects, and always encodes files for transfer using a
  Miles> conservative safe encoding).


Ah. Yes, you were right in your first post. I really didn't want to
know that as it is, officially, too scary. 

Phil