Re: rssh.el interactions with ange-ftp/efs

Yes, this is the issue. Right. So the simple question is, is there a uniform syntax that Emacs can support for accessing files that includes a method to access them? And again, I would argue that the syntax should be a URL (Or maybe, more technically, a URI - if URNs ever get anywhere emacs should support them too). Before we got sidetracked, we were discussing the good and bad points of URLs. The good points 1. URLs are a very widespread standard. 2. URLs work well for specifying resources on the net. 3. It is easy to encode an access method, username, password, and filename in a URL. 4. URLs are extensible; you can easily add new methods, new naming schemes, etc. Bad points 1. Many URLs contain //, and that means something special to Emacs 2. URLs are long 3. Many URLs (ftp, http) might make it awkward to express relative filenames in the way that EFS does. My proposal is that in the low-level functions that emacs uses to work with files, if the filename looks like a URI then the resolution of that to data should be delegated to a loader function. As a special case, the EFS syntax (/username＠host:filename) should also be supported; it should delegate to a "default" load method, which by default should be ftp, but could be user settable to be something else. As for bad points of URLs.. for #1, emacs should be smarter about //. If the string looks like a URL, don't do the special stripping that emacs does. For #2, I think supporting the EFS syntax as a special case would take care of it. For #3, I'm not so sure - it has to be handled on a case by case basis for each protocol. ftp is easy, rcp/scp/ssh is easy, I'm not so sure about http. One last little bit - someone will need to define a URL syntax for methods that don't currently have URLs. ssh, for instance. That should be done in coordination with the people who develop those tools. nelson(a)media.mit.edu . . . . . . . . http://www.media.mit.edu/~nelson/