Tramp, "[]" in file names, and file-expand-wildcards

[Kai Großjohann]

Some time ago, Eli (I think it was him) said it's not a good idea to
use a file-name-handler-alist entry which has overlap in the file
names with an existing entry.  (If only one of the entries is supposed
to be called.)

The old Tramp filename format was "/r:address@hidden:/path/to/file".  Of
course, this collides with Ange-FTP which interprets this as a file on
host "r".  Things _mostly_ worked okay since Tramp came first in
file-name-handler-alist, but there were some glitches.

So I changed it to "/address@hidden/path/to/file".

But this one collides with file-expand-wildcards: if it finds "[", it
extracts the directory component of the filename and expands wildcards
there.  Of course, the directory component still contains
"/address@hidden", and hence, still a "[", and so an infloop results.

So, what do I do now?

Is there a strategy which can help me choose the right filename
syntax, or is the file-expand-wildcards infloop just a bug which ought
to be fixed?  (The fix could be as simple as making this an operation
handled by filename handlers.)

If I need to choose a different filename syntax, then maybe I should
say what I need.

Most Tramp filenames have four components:

    method      gives a method to log in (ssh vs rsh vs telnet, ...)
    user        clear
    host        clear
    path        clear

So the filename looks like this:

    /[method/address@hidden

But for the special `multi' method, there can be several `hops':

    /[multi/ssh:address@hidden/telnet:address@hidden

Hops are separated by slashes, each hop gives a login method (ssh,
telnet) and a user and a host name.

tia,
kai
-- 
Linux provides a nice `poweroff' command, but where is `poweron'?