Change Tramp syntax (was: [Emacs-diffs] master 37b88d7: Fix bug#23006)

[Michael Albinus]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>> I hate this ambiguity since ever (I've entered Tramp maintenace in
>> 2002).  But we are much too late to change the syntax.
>
> Of course not.  It can be changed very easily, and very few users if any
> will suffer from it.  In all likelihood the only cases where this
> occurs are interactive situations, and we've generally considered it OK
> to break backward compatibility with "old humans" (as opposed to "old
> code", where we usually try to preserve this compatibility) except for
> specific cases where we think that it will inconvenience muscle memory of
> too many users.

IIRC, the main reason to declare the method part optional was to still
support ange-ftp syntax. Now it's 15 years later, and the number of
ange-ftp users might have decreased.

> Let's get rid of this ambiguity once and for all, so we can move on,
> instead of adding hacks to try and keep it alive even longer.

Maybe we shall start a poll, in emacs-devel, emacs-help and
tramp-devel. We should not ask what a user prefers (many of them will
prefer not to type a method). They question must be what will be broken
if we stop support for ange-ftp syntax "/host:/path/to/file".

This would also mean, that we cannot support default methods anymore. A
file name with a default method would look like "/:host:/path/to/file",
which is already the quoted file name syntax.

John? Eli?

> So I see another problem:
>
>    emacs -Q
>    M-x icomplete-mode RET
>    C-x C-f /ssh:foo:/
>
> and now suddenly it's signaling errors because it tries to connect to
> `foo` even though I haven't requested any completion yet.
> I think it should honor `non-essential' in that case and not try to open
> up a new connection until I hit TAB or some similar explicit request.

I'll check.

>         Stefan

Best regards, Michael.