Re: ange-ftp and sftp?

[Miles Bader]

Phillip Lord <p.lord@cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> I didn't know this. From my perspective, efficiency is not that much
> of an issue though. It would be nice if it ran a little quicker, but
> it works well for me. 

In my experience it can take tramp up to 30-40 seconds to open the first
file on a remote machine, even over a local network!  Ange-ftp isn't
great either, but it's faster than that (especially once the connection
is established).  I expect sftp would be even faster if made to work.

> I'm guessing that tramp tries to abstract over the different transport
> mechanisms, and so can't use their features as much?

Not really -- tramp is written for a very specific method of operation:
it uses a user login session on the remote machine, doing all
communication over the standard input and ouput channel for that login.
I think it's common to have remote login capabilities even when FTP
doesn't work, so tramp might be more widely usable.

Tramp tries to make few assumptions about the availability of various
programs on the remote machine, and doesn't assume a clear
communications channel, so it is forced to use some very clunky and slow
methods (for instance, it actually downloads various scripts to the
remote machine when it first connects, and always encodes files for
transfer using a conservative safe encoding).

-Miles
-- 
"1971 pickup truck; will trade for guns"