Emacs Tramp Hangs on Mac OS X when doing a sudo

I just found this bit of weirdness, and I am not necessarily the only one either.

Whenever using Tramp to open a file with the /sudo::/ syntax, it would hang for a long time. Sometimes not even being responsive to Ctrl-G. Looking at the process tree, I noticed that there was a stuck ping process.

This seemed to be because of the ecb-ping-options variable. It was set to

("HOST")

If that is switched to

("-c 2" "HOST")

instead, then everything should work.

The reason why it happens like this, is that under Mac OS (and probably most other BSD's) the default number of pings to execute is infinite, so ping stays hung (he, he, allllright).

I haven't extensively tested this, and the ecb-ping-options variable might need to be this instead:

("-c" "2" "HOST")