Re: Integrate Tramp

[Kai Großjohann]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> I think we need to implement this now, before the next release,
> because having two alternative syntaxes for remote file names is not a
> coherent interface.  It is usable for wizards, but not clean and nice.
>
> If we can arrange to use the same remote file name syntax
> that people are used to, it will also mean less for users to learn.

Tramp knows the following kinds of filenames (square brackets are
literal characters):

/[host]file
/address@hidden
/[method/address@hidden
/[multi/hop1:address@hidden/hop2:address@hidden

The last variant I call multi-hop method.  It can contain an
arbitrary number of hops.  A hop looks like "hop:address@hidden".

Ange-FTP directly supports the first two:

/host:file
/address@hidden:file

For the others, this syntax needs to be extended.  Hm.  Let's see.
The characters "@" and ":" should not be used to separate the
method.  But maybe the method could be in square brackets.  So the
third line becomes this:

/address@hidden:file

That seems to be simple and easy enough.  Hm.  And for the multi-hop
methods, the hops could be separated by comma and the "hop" part
could be separated by "#", so we arrive at this format:

/address@hidden,address@hidden:file

This appears to be a fairly natural filename format which people
might like.

Now comes the question: in which cases should Tramp invoke Ange-FTP?
My ideas are:

* We designate a special method "ftp" which, when specified, invokes
  Ange-FTP.

* Tramp is augmented with an alist of user/host pairs and default
  methods.  This alist can be used to tell Tramp to use any method,
  including "ftp", for a specific user/host combination.

* Specifying the method in the filename overrides this alist.

What do you think?

kai
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