Re: Shell completion on w32 uses "/" instead of "\"

[Lennart Borgman]

Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > My solution also includes adding to shell-mode two lines that makes
> > shell-file-name and explicit-shell-file-name buffer local:
> >     
>
>   
> >  (make-local-variable 'list-buffers-directory)
> >  (make-local-variable 'explicit-shell-file-name)
> >  (make-local-variable 'shell-file-name)
> >     
>
> I guess I lack the big-picture here: to me, the above three lines can never
> be the right fix for anything.  At best, they may be acceptable workarounds
> in some special cases.
> `make-local-variable' to me only makes sense when followed pretty much
> immediately by `set' or `setq' on the same variable.
>   

I do not know about the first line, it was there before.

However I know about the other two. The situation on w32 regarding 
shells is quite complicated, but I believe that part of what I have seen 
could apply to other platforms as well.

Since there are many shells to use (at least on w32) and you in a case 
like completion wants to do it for the shell you are actually using in 
the interactive shell buffer (*Shell*) you need to know which shell is 
used in that particular buffer (or rather how completion should be done 
of course). A structured way to handle this is needed.

How that structured way should look is a bit more complicated to tell. I 
preferred to make those variables local in just the interactive shell 
buffers. That would lead to a minimal disruption since their use there 
is very limited I believe. The bad thing about this is that this 
situation was not foreseen before. There is no notion about how to 
handle situations like this and the exact use of these variables.

I suspect however that there are other similar cases where these 
variables should be buffer local so does it not seem like they simply 
should be made local with make-variable-buffer-local? There might be 
other situations when you need to know which shell is used.