Re: AucTeX and TRAMP

[Ikumi Keita]

Hi Philip,

>>>>> Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:
> I was wondering if there is a reason that AucTeX (apparently) doesn't
> support TRAMP by default?  I have a laptop without a Texlive
> installation, so I'd build my documents on a server.  This doesn't work
> by default, but after applying this patch that uses `process-file' and
> `start-file-process' it appears to work as indented:

Thanks for your proposal. It seems that the attached patch can be a
starting point for the remote processing feature.

I think that there still remains some issues to be fixed, or at least
considered.
(1) What to do with viewing the output, typically a pdf file? When the
    local machine runs X11 and ssh is used to communicate with the
    remote server, pdf viewer on the remote server can show a window on
    the local machine. On other settings, it seems very difficult to me
    to obtain the view for output.
(2) AUCTeX offers completion candidates for files in the file system for
    \input, \include etc. This feature needs a lot of directory listing
    operation (e.g. see `TeX-search-files-kpathsea'), so would be much
    slow for remote server.
(3) It is not only `call-process' and `start-process' that needs to be
    tailored. When AUCTeX detect an error in the console output from TeX
    process, it opens the file where the error occurs. If the file name
    is provided as absolute path in TeX log (which means the path on the
    remote server), AUCTeX will not able to open that file.
(4) AUCTeX checks the existence of the executable of viewers (the third
    element of each entry in `TeX-view-program-list-builtin' and
    `TeX-view-program-list'.) This procedure wouldn't work for the
    executable on the remote server.

If there are reasonable solutions for these issues, the remote
processing feature may be feasible to be included in AUCTeX.

Regards,
Ikumi Keita
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