VC and Tramp

[Andre Spiegel]

Ok, Kai and I are hereby coming back into the public :-).  There are
some issues relating to integration of VC and Tramp (formerly rcp.el),
which are probably of general interest.

I think for questions about single lines of codes, possible doc
inconsistencies etc. personal e-mail is ok and preferable, and if
a broader issue emerges, carry that to the list.  Here we go...

The problem is that while most of VC's code works fine with tramp,
there are a few small things that don't, in particular relating to
vc-do-command.  Kai asked me whether we should add support for tramp
via a separate backend, e.g. vc-rcs-tramp.el, which would have to
duplicate a lot of code from vc-rcs.el (and then do that again for
vc-sccs.el and vc-cvs.el), or whether vc-do-command should be extended
to handle the problematic cases.

I strongly favor the latter.  And since tramp is now an integral part
of Emacs (it is, isn't it?), I even wonder whether it needs to be done
via the general file-name-handler mechanism, or whether some
hard-coded solution in vc-do-command wouldn't be even better.

Kai, in the light of this, could you tell us something about the
problems and the options in detail?