Re: file-remote-p being called too often?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "T.V Raman" <raman@google.com>
> Cc: Emacs Devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>,  Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2024 13:18:09 -0800
> 
> Above gets invoked when emacspeak plays a local audio file as an earcon
> using a shell command; there should be no reason to run file-remote-p in
> this case.
> 
> Debugger entered--entering a function:
> * (file-remote-p "/home/raman/emacs/lisp/emacspeak/sounds/" localname)
>   (file-local-name "/home/raman/emacs/lisp/emacspeak/sounds/")
>   (executable-find "pactl")
>   (emacspeak-sounds-get-file process-active)
>   (emacspeak-play-auditory-icon process-active)
>   (emacspeak-auditory-icon process-active)
>   (emacspeak-speak-mode-line nil)

Why does emacspeak repeatedly call executable-find, and from a
mode-line format on top of that?  Why not call executable-find just
once, and then store the result in some variable, to be reused on
subsequent calls from emacspeak-speak-mode-line?

In any case, for local file names, such as "pactl", the call to
file-remote-p should be very inexpensive.  Do you have a reason to
believe it is somehow expensive in your case?  Or did you just wonder
why file-remote-p is called that often, regardless of whether it's
expensive?  The reason for frequent calls seems to be that you have
this call in your mode-line-format, which is not a good design.  This
design means executable-find will be called every redisplay cycle,
time and time again, for the same program name, which is hardly a good
idea.