GNU Info

(tramp)Remote File Ownership

---

Next: Back-end Versions Up: Miscellaneous Version Control

---

Enter node , (file) or (file)node

How VC determines who owns a workfile
-------------------------------------

Emacs provides the `user-full-name' function to return the login name
of the current user as well as mapping from arbitrary user id values
back to login names. The VC code uses this functionality to map from the
uid of the owner of a workfile to the login name in some circumstances.

   This will not, for obvious reasons, work if the remote system has a
different set of logins. As such, it is necessary to delegate to the
remote machine the job of determining the login name associated with a
uid.

   Unfortunately, with the profusion of distributed management systems
such as `NIS', `NIS+' and `NetInfo', there is no simple, reliable and
portable method for performing this mapping.

   Thankfully, the only place in the VC code that depends on the
mapping of a uid to a login name is the `vc-file-owner' function. This
returns the login of the owner of the file as a string.

   This function has been advised to use the output of `ls' on the
remote machine to determine the login name, delegating the problem of
mapping the uid to the login to the remote system which should know more
about it than I do.