Re: Quotes in Dired listing switches

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

>> Is it possible to improve Tramp to set LC_ALL to "C" only for commands
>> where Tramp expects English?  Or just to set LC_MESSAGES to "C" if Tramp
>> expects only English messages?
>
> That's something I have thought about already. But it requires a very
> precise review of Tramp's communication, in order to identify those
> places in the code. And also LC_NUMERIC might be involved; I fear that
> Tramp might be confused by reading numbers with a thousand separator.
> (Hopefully, `tramp-send-command-and-read' is the only place, but I do
> not know whether we have been careful enough writing tramp.el)
>
> Furthermore, Tramp cannot expect Unicode on the remote machine. There
> might be anything encoded ...

There is another related problem: Tramp doesn't display the Dired buffer
when an older version of `ls' on the remote machine doesn't support
a new switch supported by the local newer version of `ls'.

Something like below could handle this situation to remove unsupported
switches before running `ls' on the remote machine:

(add-hook 'dired-before-readin-hook
          (lambda ()
            (when (file-remote-p default-directory)
              (setq dired-actual-switches
                    (replace-regexp-in-string "--block-size='1" ""
                                              dired-actual-switches)))))

but this is an ugly hack.  Do you have an idea how to handle this problem?

> I put it on the todo list. I won't change it before Emacs 23.2 is out,
> due to stability reasons.

Yes, this is not an urgent problem, but rather a need for improvement.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/