Re: ftp & multi-hop?

[Kai Grossjohann]

Michael Albinus <address@hidden> writes:

> smbclient is very similar to ftp (even a comparable command set). It
> doesn't speak to an FTP server but to an SMB server like Samba, or the
> MS Windows built-in one. There's no way to call remote commands;
> smbclient cannot be used as inline method.

How many places did you have to change where Tramp currently invokes
shell commands?

*looking*

Oh, tramp-smb is quite long :-)  Whee.  So it wouldn't be all that
easy to adapt Tramp for FTP; one would have to redo all the work you
did on tramp-smb and then perhaps more.  (Ange-FTP contains lots of
kludges for various kinds of servers.)

So I guess the workable approach would be to aim for some closer
integration of Ange-FTP into Tramp.  Maybe frob the place where
Ange-FTP calls the ftp client, but once the ftp client has been
started, let Ange-FTP take over to do all the chit-chat with the
server for filename completion and suchlike.

Thoughts?

Kai