Re: project-find-file: switch to include non-tracked files

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 14.10.2021 15:06, Manuel Uberti wrote:
> On 14/10/21 14:01, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> > As an aside, I can see what kind of problem this is solving, and this 
> > is a (meta) problem by itself. We need, like, ignores which are still 
> > honored when we don't use any other ignore instructions. Maybe a 
> > separate variable or something? AFAICS helm-ls-git doesn't have 
> > anything for this.
>
> > The above will continue to work until we try to move the listing logic 
> > to a backend-specific method. Then vc-directory-exclusion-list won't 
> > be referenced anymore. That's the main reason this feature is not in 
> > emacs-28 anyway.
>
> I didn't know about this.

If we end up adding a new user option for this, what would you call it?

> > As a rough guess, perhaps some directories in this repo are not 
> > readable for you?
>
> Yes, great tip, you nailed it. There is one directory I cannot read in 
> there, so I just added that to vc-directory-exclusion-list and 
> everything works as expected now.

We should probably try to handle this is a more transparent way, showing 
the exact error message to the user (when the buffer contains lots of 
output as well, the message becomes next to useless).

Could you try applying the patch below, removing your recent 
customization and seeing whether the error message is better now?

diff --git a/lisp/progmodes/project.el b/lisp/progmodes/project.el
index 79d2e050d9..7c3bb9229d 100644
--- a/lisp/progmodes/project.el
+++ b/lisp/progmodes/project.el
@@ -322,7 +322,15 @@ project--files-in-directory
              (process-file-shell-command command nil t))
             (pt (point-min)))
         (unless (zerop status)
-          (error "File listing failed: %s" (buffer-string)))
+          (goto-char (point-min))
+          (if (and
+               (not (eql status 127))
+               (search-forward "Permission denied\n"))
+              (let ((end (1- (point))))
+                (re-search-backward "\\`\\|\0")
+                (error "File listing failed: %s"
+                       (buffer-substring (1+ (point)) end)))
+            (error "File listing failed: %s" (buffer-string))))
         (goto-char pt)
         (while (search-forward "\0" nil t)
           (push (buffer-substring-no-properties (1+ pt) (1- (point)))