Thanks for the response Michael. Clearly I wasn't interested in a flamewar either. + I submitted a relatively complete bug report + I explained how I got there + I explained its relative importance + I provided evidence that others were seeing this issue in different areas + I explained I was not a windows developer + I proposed an initial suggested fix None of these are activities someone looking for a flamewar would do Imagine my horror to be met on the very first response from Gnu + What I wanted the maintainers to do was unreasonable + My particular configuration invalidated the need to look at the bug entirely + A misrepresentation of my fix making it look much more fragile + Being given a vague demand to produce more evidence and no instructions on what was needed or how to supply it *What is the full contents of the environment of the Emacs process whenyou run that zapped binary?* And then to have a defamatory slur placed in the bug report. Michael, I am not interested in a flamewar, regardless, your trust in him aside, I was abused by Eli this morning. > Your first proposal, trusting C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe, hasn't been accepted, by reasons Eli has given. And indeed, it looks too me like too much heuristic, so I'm with Eli. I don't even know what that means. As I said: + *"**C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe"* THIS WAS LITERALLY NOT WHAT I PROPOSED + Regardless, when COMSPEC is not defined, assigning NIL to tramp-encoding-shell CERTAINLY IS WRONG. + Other people are seeing this problem too, google it as I showed you. Since you are the maintainer, I would never deign to claim I know more than you do about TRAMP So please Michael, + bug reporters are often NOT the best person to analyse or propose a solution. + When COMSPEC is not defined, assigning NIL to tramp-encoding-shell CERTAINLY IS WRONG. + Other people see this problem too., WHAT DO YOU THE MAINTAINER PROPOSE as a solution? Since I am not a windows developer, I think my actual proposal setting the value to "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\cmd.exe" is a reasonable first start. I note it seems to work up to and including Windows 10 64. I don't know where cmd.exe is supposed to live, or how it's supposed to be found, but I do know the path I suggested, which misrepresented as you and Eli have done, actually works and would work FAR better than setting it to NIL. Once more, I am not a windows developer, you are the maintainer, I have reported a bug, a bug felt not just by me but by many others, the current code, which sets it to NIL is 10,000% guaranteed to be wrong, since you REJECTED my proposed suggestion which would seem to work in most cases and be a great place to start, Here are a list of many other people who see this bug: https://www.google.com/search?q=emacs+cmd.exe+tramp-encoding-shell+string-match AS THE TRAMP MAINTAINER, WHAT DO YOU SUGGEST TO FIX THIS BUG? Thank you for your attention, Jerry On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Michael Albinus wrote: > Jerry Asher writes: > > Hi Jerry, > > >> Tramp is designed to work with Emacs as released by the Emacs > >> development team. That Emacs doesn't have this problem. I think it > >> would be unreasonable for anyone to expect the Tramp maintainers to > >> cater to arbitrary changes in the Emacs code or in how it is > >> configured on Windows, let alone if you poke some addresses in the PE > >> headers of the produced binary. > > > > We are ALREADY talking about a very specific setting IN emacs FOR > > Windows. God forbid we should ask the maintainers to discuss how emacs > > is configured on Windows in that context. > > > >> Your fix is AFAIK incorrect because the directory where cmd.exe > >> lives > >> is not necessarily C:\Windows\system32. It just happens to be there > >> on the particular system where you tried that. > > > > And I agree, setting the variable to nil where it is guaranteed to > > blow up, and is reported to do so as my search shows is FAR FAR better > > than finding a reasonable default that will work most of the time. > > I'm not interested in any flamewar. Pls stop. > > I haven't too much knowledge about MS Windows, and many years of > experience let me trust Eli. > > If you are interested in changing Tramp according to your needs, pls be > cooperative. Make a proposal about a config option which could be used > instead of the COMSPEC env which doesn't exist in your environment. Make > a proposal how to avoid calling cmd.exe at all, it seems not be > mandatory, I believe. Propose something else what is possible. > > Your first proposal, trusting C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe, hasn't been > accepted, by reasons Eli has given. And indeed, it looks too me like too > much heuristic, so I'm with Eli. > > Best regards, Michael. > > PS: I am the Tramp maintainer. >