Re: Fixing dired hangs when NFS mount goes AWOL

[Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>>> Why would it break Tramp?
>> There was a very long discussion about, see
>> <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/87506/focus=87506>
>
> I know, I participated in that thread.  I fail to see how it answers
> the question.

It was a more general discussion about changing the semantics of
file-remote-p. Caused by a similar problem (remote shares in MS Windows,
which are not responsive).

The discussion went into the direction, that maybe an opposite function,
file-local-p, might be useful. An interesting argument was given by
Andreas Schwab: what about mounted CD-ROMs, or USB devices? Are they
"local" or "remote".

>> Tramp uses file-remote-p internally. OK, this could be replaced by an
>> internal function.
>
> It depends on whether it uses it right or not.

Whatever is TRT. In this, we disagree.

>> Other packages use it as well, inside and outside core Emacs.
>
> What does it mean "use it as well"?  In which way are those uses
> incompatible with a file-remote-p which returns non-nil for SSHFS and
> NFS mounts?
>
>> Not so important for basic file name operations, but needed for all
>> process related things.
>
> These are the uses which should use something like
> file-accessible-directory-p instead of file-remote-p, right?

A needed functionality is to translate between "local" file names (on
the remote host), and "remote" file names in the sense of Tramp. The
usual implementation is

local -> remote:   (concat (file-remote-p default-directory) filename)
remote -> local:   (file-remote-p filename 'localname)

>         Stefan

Best regards, Michael.