Subject: 30.0.50; [FR] avoid putting remote files to local trash

From: Ruijie Yu <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2022 15:46:33 -0600

Hello,

I have been organizing my files lately over multiple devices using
tramp.  One issue I find with my current setup is that since I set
`delete-by-moving-to-trash' to t, all files, even the remote ones, are
moved to my trash directory.

This, unfortunately, harms my workflow because the files I wanted to
delete include some random multi-gig files, as well as many .git
directories, both of which greatly bottleneck my file-deletion process.
I also don't want to disable trashing globally, because I think putting
local files to trash (which do not introduce a significant delay) is
still a good idea.

In response to this, I want to propose a change to the logic under which
trashing is performed rather than deletion.  However, I am not sure
which one of my following two ideas is more appropriate.

1. Allow the user to disable "moving to local trash" only for remote
files.  I imagine this would entail allowing the user to set
`delete-by-moving-to-trash' to 'local, and modifying `delete-file',
`delete-directory', `dired-internal-do-deletions' among other functions
accordingly.  Alternatively we can have a dedicated variable for this
purpose.

In this case, if `delete-by-moving-to-trash' is set to 'local, whenever
a user deletes a remote file such as "/sudo::/etc/os-release", it is
simply deleted as if via "/sudo:://bin/rm", whereas when the user
deletes a local file ".bashrc", it is moved to trash as normal.

2. Use a dedicated local trash directory for each remote, optionally
behind a toggle.  E.g. for files under "/sudo::" remote, we might have
the trash directory as "/sudo::.local/share/Trash".  I am not sure how
this would interact with `trash-directory', as I have this as nil and
simply let Emacs use the XDG path for trash.

This might additionally pose some challanges when multiple remotes are
aliases to each other, for example, "/sshx:user@localhost:.bashrc" and
"/sshx:[email-masked]:.bashrc" logically are the same file, but it might
be hard to programmatically check that two hosts are equivalent.

Best,

RY