Re: recentf-cleanup, file-readable-p & remote files

[Jesper Harder]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     I said a while ago on emacs-devel that I would look into sorting out
>     these "file cleaning up functions" for both saveplace and recentf, so
>     that there is a common implementation. Dealing with remote files would
>     certainly be part of that tidy-up. I'm sorry that I haven't got round
>     to doing it yet, but I will do (unless someone wants to jump in).
>
> Please coordinate with David Ponce <address@hidden>.
> He is continuing to work on recentf.

David, thanks for fixing the problem about `recentf-cleanup'
signalling an error.

But I'm still not sure if it's not a good idea for `recentf-cleanup'
to call `file-readable-p' on remote files _at all_.  The reason is
that it can be a *very* slow operation.

For example the following takes nearly 5 minutes for me [1]:

  (file-readable-p "/address@hidden:/usenet/control/alt/alt.religion.emacs.gz"))

Now imagine if you happen to have a few of these files in ~/.recentf
-- if your turn on recentf in .emacs, this could delay Emacs startup
for many minutes.


[1] I don't think ftp.isc.org is particularly slow, it's just a big directory.