RE: Emacs unconditionally loads tramp.el

[Drew Adams]

    > The thing I find annoying is I've never been able to get it
    > to work on MS Windows

    There are "plink" methods for working with PuTTY's command-line
    terminal. I think Cygwin's ssh port expects to be run from an
    interactive Cygwin bash shell, so doesn't work well under Emacs.

Yeah, I know. I think I tried plink and putty, and I will likely try them
again some rainy day.

Y'know, I don't remember ever doing anything special to get ange-ftp to
work. IIRC, I picked up vanilla Emacs and immediately accessed remote files.
Maybe I'm forgetting something, but it can't have been too difficult.

We're always talking about making things easier for newbies to use Emacs.
Well, if we expect Windows users to pick Emacs up and use it out of the box,
and if we want them to use Emacs to access remote files, and if tramp is the
default way to do that now, then I suspect we're going to be disappointed in
our expectations. Many Windows users will never experience using Emacs to
access remote files - that's my guess. And that's too bad - this Emacs
feature is much more important than most of the minutia we spend time
discussing in our attempts to make things friendlier for Emacs newbies
(menus, toolbars, fringe,...).

Here's another consideration for our globalized world: The number of people
who use MS Windows only for personal desktop stuff (mail, browser,
Word,...), and who access remote (who knows where? Texas? Bangalore?
Ireland?) GNU/Linux farm boxes for development or other stuff, is growing
fast. Nearly all of the developers at my (large) company work that way in
one way or another - likewise for many non-developers. Some people work
directly on remote G/L boxes via gateways like Tarantella and VNC, but
others prefer to work locally on Windows and access remote G/L boxes via
Emacs (ange-ftp). Some people might bother to go through the hassle of
setting up tramp to work correctly, but others will give up, I suspect.
Non-developers? Forget it....

Sorry for the rant. I just hate to see good things that work well stop
working in the name of progress. On n'arrete pas le progres...