Re: A Modest Proposal

[Andy Moreton]

On Wed 04 May 2016, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Andy Moreton <address@hidden>
>> Date: Wed, 04 May 2016 09:51:52 +0100
>> 
>> On Tue 03 May 2016, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> 
>> > AFAIK ls-lisp is implemented with functions that are also handled by
>> > Tramp, so it should work just as well.
>> 
>> Except for platforms where ls-lisp does not understand the underlying
>> file system in the same way as the external tool.
>
> ls-lisp understands the underlying filesystem as well as Emacs does.
>
>> For example, on windows the permissions from ls-lisp are fairly
>> meaningless
>
> No, they are not meaningless.  I wonder why you say that.
>
>> and do not match what is reported from MSYS, MSYS2 or Cygwin
>> versions of ls
>
> Why should they match?  Cygwin emulates Posix user/group/world
> permissions using NTFS security features, and in particular encodes
> the Posix attribute bits in Windows ACEs using its own private scheme.
> There's no reason to expect native calls to match that scheme.

The scheme is publically documented, and closely follows the mappings
previously used by the Interix (aka Services for Unix) subsystem. The
code is GPL, so I don;t understand why you think this is private.

>> Please keep things the way they are.
>
> Not sure why do you say that.  If you mean that you'd like to have use
> Cygwin/MSYS 'ls' from a native Emacs, then I don't recommend that, due
> to the above-mentioned mismatches.  You could have a file listed as
> inaccessible, which actually is, or vice versa.  Why is that a good
> idea?

While it is simpler to use a homogenous environment, there are
significant uses of mixed environments, where the emacs binary and the
platform differ in their view of the filesystem.

It's ok to change the default implementation to prefer using an emacs
internal implementation rather than an external program, but the
proposal was to remove use of external programs, which would make emacs
less useful.

    AndyM