Magit with tramp leaves temporary files in repository

[laudrup]

I confirm that...

• I searched the FAQ, issue tracker, discussions board, documentation, and wiki, and did not find an answer to my question.

• Any discussions with or conclusions derived from the use of LLMs will be omitted from my question.

What is your question?

When using magit with a tramp/ssh connection to a remote host, I get a lot of files with a pattern similar to:

#e47ad05cdf18bc34d69df0d782ea216e1c180392#.~;0f6e0f8538628bb10e9436831351f7564cea165b~

which seems to contain a copy of files with changes not yet commited. These files are still present even after commiting changes ending up cluttering the repository. It seems like I have to remove these files manually.

This is of course just a minor annoyance and I could limit it by adding those to my .gitgnore but that doesn't really solve the actual problem.

It has been a bit hard for me to try to find anything related to this issue as this doesn't seem to be related to where tramp stores temporary files (they are in /tmp as expected) and it's kind of hard to search for a pattern matching these files.

I also don't know if this is actually related to doom emacs but I haven't done any special configuration so this is just magit+tramp "out of the box" with doom emacs.

Any way to avoid having to clean up these files would be appreciated as well as pointers to where I might find more information.

Thanks a lot.

System information

https://gist.github.com/laudrup/33ea96dc60a335316967ca26d0956ba4

[AjaiKN]

I think this is a bug in Doom. I noticed it a while ago and fixed it in my private config, but I never got around to reporting it to Doom. Does adding the following to your config.el fix the issue?

;; in $DOOMDIR/config.el

(setq tramp-auto-save-directory "~/.cache/doom/tramp-autosave/")

(after! doom-editor
  ;; TODO: PR or issue
  (defadvice! doom-make-hashed-auto-save-file-name-a (fn)
    "Compress the auto-save file name so paths don't get too long."
    :around #'make-auto-save-file-name
    (let ((buffer-file-name
           (if (or
                ;; Don't do anything for non-file-visiting buffers. Names
                ;; generated for those are short enough already.
                (null buffer-file-name)
                ;; If an alternate handler exists for this path, bow out. Most of
                ;; them end up calling `make-auto-save-file-name' again anyway, so
                ;; we still achieve this advice's ultimate goal.
                (find-file-name-handler buffer-file-name
                                        'make-auto-save-file-name))
               buffer-file-name
             ;;CHANGED
             (concat (or (and (string-match-p "/tramp-autosave/" buffer-file-name)
                              (file-name-directory buffer-file-name))
                         "")
                     (sha1 buffer-file-name)))))
      (funcall fn))))

[hlissner]

The tramp defaults were moved to a new :emacs tramp module in doomemacs/doomemacs@71eae25. So tramp-backup-directory-alist and tramp-auto-save-directory were moved. If you weren't using the new module, then tramp is saving temp files to their Emacs default location: the current working directory.

The quick fix is to enable :emacs tramp.

Otherwise, a much simpler version of AjaKN's fix:

(setq tramp-auto-save-directory (concat doom-cache-dir "tramp-autosave/")
      tramp-backup-directory-alist backup-directory-alist)

In any case, I'll move these two variables back to Doom core soon so the module isn't required for these files.

[AjaiKN]

At least in my testing, I don't think either of those fixes work. And laudrup seems to already have :emacs tramp enabled (according to the system information they posted). I'll try to explain what I think the bug is, though it's pretty confusing.

If tramp-auto-save-directory is set, then tramp-handle-make-auto-save-file-name temporarily sets auto-save-file-name-transforms to nil while running (tramp-run-real-handler #'make-auto-save-file-name nil). That would normally be fine because in that case, tramp-handle-make-auto-save-file-name sets buffer-file-name to be inside of tramp-auto-save-directory, so the result of (tramp-run-real-handler #'make-auto-save-file-name nil) is still inside of tramp-auto-save-directory.

The problem is that doom-make-hashed-auto-save-file-name-a replaces the entire buffer-file-name with (sha1 buffer-file-name). So the result of (tramp-run-real-handler #'make-auto-save-file-name nil) is inside of default-directory instead of being inside tramp-auto-save-directory.

My inelegant fix for doom-make-hashed-auto-save-file-name-a was to ensure that whenever the original buffer-file-name is inside of tramp-auto-save-directory, the modified buffer-file-name is also inside of tramp-auto-save-directory.