Re: lisp/url/url-https.el

[Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> I think piggybacking on top of Tramp would be best, since it does so
> much of the work already.

As always, there are two sides of the coin.

The negative side:

Tramp doesn't really do much of what you might need.  The bulk of it
is concerned with sending shell commands to a remote host.  But the
file encryption thingy wouldn't send shell commands to a remote host,
presumably ;-)

One thing that you _might_ be able to leverage is the filename parsing
functions.  But is that really worth it?

The positive side:

Unified filename syntax might be useful.  So GPG'd files could be
called /gpg:/some/file.  Users might like this regular filename
syntax.

Tramp provides an interface to foreign handlers, which makes
integration of a handler almost the same work as putting an entry in
file-name-handler-alist.  In file-name-handler-alist you put a regexp
and a handler function, but in tramp-foreign-file-name-handler-alist
you put a predicate and a handler function.  Writing a predicate that
does regexp matching on the filename is a two-liner.

In tramp-ftp.el you can see what is required to use the Tramp foreign
handler interface to integrate Ange-FTP.  This is a worst-case
scenario IMHO since Ange-FTP was not written with Tramp in mind at
all.  For your handler, you should be able to do MUCH better.

Much kudos to Michael for designing the foreign handler interface.

Kai