Subject: bug#3736: 23.1.50; Please use null-device instead of /dev/null

From: Michael Albinus <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2020 16:16:01 +0100

Michael Albinus <[email-masked]> writes:

Hi Stefan,

>>>> Probably the best solution is for tramp to implement a general
>>>> server-local-variable mechanism, as there are probably other variables
>>>> that need different values for different servers too.  The user could
>>>> then configure a variable (such as tramp-server-local-variable-alist)
>>>> to define any such variables that they need to, which would then be
>>>> let bound as appropriate in tramp functions.
>>>
>>> Nice idea. Tramp does it already in some cases (for example for
>>> environment variables of the remote host), but your proposal is more
>>> general.
>
>> Now that we have this concept of "connection local variables", does that
>> satisfy the requirement to be able to specify null-device for remote
>> hosts?
>
> Yes, shall be possible. I'll see what I could do (with slow progress, as
> it happens these days to me). Target will be Emacs 28.

I've added the functions null-device and path-separator, which return
the connection-local values of the respective variables. As first shot,
I've changed grep.el using this. Let's see whether there's
feedback. However, people will see a difference only if they work on a
local w32 system, and apply Emacs's grep command on a remote machine --
a constellation I cannot test myself.

I'll continue to adapt other Emacs Lisp files.

Best regards, Michael.