make file-expand-wildcards a filename handler operation?

[Kai Großjohann]

Do you think it's a good idea to make file-expand-wildcards a
filename handler operation?

Imagine the user types C-x C-f /tmp/foo.tar/[abc].c RET and there is
a `tar' filename handler which matches all *.tar files.  Clearly, the
default function wouldn't do anything useful in this case, but the
filename handler might.

I currently see this because Tramp uses filenames like this:

    /address@hidden/path/to/file

The "/[" and "]" are literally part of the filename.

Now you could tell me that this was a bad choice for a filename
format for remote files, but even if I change this, that doesn't help
with the `tar' example I gave above.

In Emacs 21, it works anyway because find-file-noselect looks if
file-expand-wildcards returns nil and then does as if
find-file-wildcards was nil.

But in Emacs 20, the current Tramp filename format doesn't work right.

I have now installed a kludge in Tramp which looks if it is running on
Emacs 20.  And if so, it uses defadvice to make file-expand-wildcards
always return at least one filename -- the argument if no expansion
could be found.

Thoughts?
kai
-- 
Lisp is kinda like tpircstsoP