Re: How do I debug this?

[Mark Geary]

On Sat, 26 Aug 2017, Michael Albinus wrote:

> Mark Geary <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > I can see if the sysadmin is willing, though he's on vacation now.
>
> If he's willing, you might convince him to install Emacs 25.2.

He was not willing. ("We install whatever the OS vendor supplies.")
But since we no longer have quotas turned on for our home directories,
I installed it myself. My problems connecting to this FreeBSD machine
went away.

> Tramp doesn't trust (remote) login shells to be POSIX compatible. So it
> uses /bin/sh remotely.

Which, in practice, isn't always POSIX compatible, either.

Once I got the Mac-->BSD and Linux-->BSD connections working I tried
connecting from the Linux box to a Solaris 10 box.  I've attached an
excerpt from the debug output.

I was confused at first by the error message regarding "invalid file
‘~/.tramp_history’".

It turns out that /bin/sh on this machine is /bin/jsh, which doesn't
understand ~ expansion. After adding

   (add-to-list 'tramp-connection-properties
                (list (regexp-quote "sfmg10:")
                      "remote-shell" "/usr/bin/bash"))

to my .emacs, it works. So my problems with Tramp are, essentially,
solved. What still puzzles me, though, is that

   (add-to-list 'tramp-connection-properties
                (list (regexp-quote "\(scp\|ssh\):sfmg1[0-4]:")
                      "remote-shell" "/usr/bin/bash"))

doesn't work.

I gues there is another thing which isn't exactly a problem, but is an
annoyance. When I'm editing a file on the FreeBSD machine. I fequently
get messages [falsely] warning me that the file has changed on the
remote host. This happened with both Emacs 23.1.1 and now with 25.2. I
don't think I see this when connecting to any other machine.  How does
Tramp check this, and do you have any ideas why it might be reporting
false positives?

Mark Geary

--
Fifty-four Forty or Fight!

tramp-to-solaris10
Description: tramp-to-solaris10