Re: Change in expand-file-name in Emacs

Kai> Maybe you want to do this in XEmacs, too? Kai> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: Kai> Who's to know? Well, since to my mind the semantics of looking up "~" for remote hosts (which may not even grok the concept) are questionable, I'd like to know where this is going. I think it's very reasonable to have a facility which does completion etc on remote paths for interactive use, but non-interactive, I don't know about that. I've never seen an expand-file-name call wrapped in a condition-case. ;-) So I'd like to see examples where it's useful, so I can wrap my brain around intended semantics. Also, I'm not sure that I agree that the proper interpretation of "/x/../me＠home.net:/~" is "/me＠home.net:/home/me". That's mixing two different purely textual manipulations. It's so subtle I'm not even sure it matters ... but it makes me nervous. Kai> expand-file-name *is* a file operation. As far I can tell from the documentation, it's intended to be an operation on strings. It is not supposed to actually attempt to look up the path on the system. I suppose it's reasonable to interpret that you should look up the user name on the remote system, but it's equally reasonable to interpret that as an attempt to access the path (which is not necessary for a local name; although lookups in /etc/passwd or whatever access the file system, they do not attempt to access any part of the path being computed, except / of course ;-). On systems using NIS or similar, this might not even involve any file system lookup by XEmacs at all! Kai> ITYM "/me＠home.net:~", with the leading slash? Yes. Kai> The behavior of expand-file-name in this case hasn't changed. Blech. You're right. I can only imagine that there are no practical non-interactive situations in which this is desirable, or we would have had bug reports about bogus net accesses when disconnected. (Note that in that case expand-file-name will throw an error (I assume; it throws one for a non-existent host) and thus if you have such an expression in init.el, the init file breaks.) Lack of such reports (init file or in general) suggests people hardly ever use this feature of expand-file-name. Anyway, you're obviously making things more consistent since EFS does provide a handler for expand-file-name, and on that basis I won't object to a patch to 21.5 if you or someone else submits one. (I may however produce a counter-patch to avoid this behavior, at least to be user-configurable.:-) -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.