Subject: bug#60505: 29.0.60; Fido Mode and Tramp Completion

From: Michael Albinus <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2023 14:55:36 +0100

Gregory Heytings <[email-masked]> writes:

Hi Gregory,

> 2. Doing that is not enough, because of an incompatibility between
> Tramp and the 'flex' and 'substring' mechanisms.  The Tramp manual has
> a footnote which mentions that incompatibility: "Some completion
> styles, like `substring' or `flex', require to type at least one
> character after the trailing `:'."  A one-line patch to fix it was
> proposed, but rejected, a year and a half ago.  It is attached to this
> email, and you can use it locally.  As I said in the bug thread in
> which that patch was proposed: "I expect other bug reports from
> confused users".

I don't deny that there is a problem, and it isn't a surprise that
people report about. But I don't think that Tramp misbehaves, it does
exactly what it is specified to do.

I guess that flex and friends use completion out of the
specification. But I have no knowledge about the completion machinery;
otherwise I would have tried to find the root of the problem. I'm also
not opposed to extend the completion API for use in Tramp. What I'm
opposed to is to apply just an ad-hoc patch, which could have collateral
damages.

I still hope that somebody with more knowledge about the completion
machinery could take a stab at it.

Best regards, Michael.