🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9103031835.AA16251@fenris.idt.unit.no> steinarb@IDT.UNIT.NO (Steinar Bang) writes:

   I was a bit worried about the comments speaking about redefining
   central emacs functions.  My question is, does ange-ftp affect
   emacs' operation so much that it can't be used for ordinary
   editing?

You should be, of course.  But Andy Norman make no mistakes.  (Well,
maybe a few...).  So it's all right.

Anyway, ange-ftp does not break normal editing - it's successfully and
entirely invisible until needed, and then it works swiftly and
silently.

Here's the deal: whenever you try to read a file (through the many
many many different means available in Emacs - getting hooked into all
the means is basically why Andy had to change existing functions, I
believe), if the file begints with something like "/user@host:", then
ange-ftp reads it in through FTP.  Likewise when you write a file.  If
the file name doesn't look like that, then ange-ftp stays out of your
way.

One gotcha would be if you really wanted to have some local files with
names that look like that - but you don't, do you?

Another gotcha can arise if you load yet another package that mucks
with elemental functions, and does it less well.  Another package that
was as careful as ange-ftp would be no problem, since Andy
monotonically extends whatever is presently defined, rather than
thinking he knows what's going on.  But I've encountered a package
that installed a write-file-hook which actually wrote the file, rather
than merely doing its hooking and letting the function write the file.
In order to commit this sacrilege, it had to obliterate the
write-file-hooks list (so it didn't recurse itself), and then return
an error (so write-file wouldn't write yet again).  The result is that
I can't use this package on remote (ange-ftp) files, since it's
defeating the basic write process.  But this is clearly a bogosity (a
pair of bogosities, in fact) in this other package, not in ange-ftp.
(The "other package" is a local hack-up that you'll never encounter,
so you needn't worry about that.)


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