Re: (tramp-handleverify-visited-file-modtime

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

Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu> writes:

> Actually, I recommend the following patch to the present Tramp CVS
> version (not the Emacs CVS version) of tramp.el.  The reason is that
> we want to return t for a file that does not exist according to
> `file-attributes' _and_ for which (visited-file-modtime) returns -1,
> but nil if `file-attributes' returns nil and `visited-file-modtime'
> returns a "real" modtime (neither 0 nor -1), meaning the file _did_
> exist the last time we checked, but has been deleted in the meantime.

Sounds OK to me. I've committed the patch to Tramp CVS. Please note
that it is visible in the branch "branch-2-0-stable" only, because
I'll commit later a bigger update to the trunk which is not intended for
Emacs 21.4 (but your patch will be included there, too).

> To be completely consistent with `verify-visited-file-modtime' we
> should also return nil if the file system could not handle the file
> name because it was too long (never happens on the GNU system) or
> because there were too many symbolic links to follow.  I do not know
> whether this case is important enough to worry about.  (The patch
> below does not.)  How were we even able to visit the file in the first
> place in such a situation?

Maybe we can ignore this situation for the time being. Tramp is based
on external programs, which should report an error these cases. Tramp
won't distinguish the reason of such errors.

Best regards, Michael.