Subject: bug#31489: 25.3; Dired unable to open directory "/ssh:example.com"

From: Christoph Michelbach <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 May 2018 21:19:20 +0200

On Sun, 2018-05-20 at 20:30 +0200, Michael Albinus wrote:
> You haven't answered my question: Could you live w/o Tramp, and set
> tramp-mode to nil? Or do you want still use Tramp, and I shall extend
> Tramp with an "exclude file names" feature?
> 
> Both variants would be a solution for this.

I haven't done so because I'm not suffering from this bug atm. I do use
tramp but I don't have the problem described in the bug report in
practice. I merely wanted to find out to what extent dired can be used
as a file browser and explored some edge cases. While doing so, I found
a few problems and this is the first one (and thus far only one found
while explicitly looking for bugs) I have reported. To evade the
problem in practice, one could simply use symlinks for the folders with
the weird names. Or one could use a single simlink created via

sudo ln -s / /f

and then always start at "/f". Evading this problem in practice is
simple, but it seems to me that HAVING to evade it shows poor
usability.

> I don't see how this could be avoided. Of course, dired could quote any
> directory name with "/:" when opening a directory with a file name
> dedicated to Tramp (or another file name handling library). But this
> would discard *any* file name handlers in this subdirectory, including
> something like uncrompressing files, as jka-compr does, or decrypting
> files, whis is performed by epa.

So the problem is that this way of quoting is also used in different
places, which means that it's not possible to view the contents of
"/ssh:example.com/tarball.tar" in Emacs without removing tramp /
disabling tramp / adding an exception for this specific path?