The attached patch adds support to emacsclient for command-line options when specifying the alternate editor, so that for example one can now say:
ALTERNATE_EDITOR="emacs -Q -nw"
I have added documentation to NEWS. It did not seem necessary to change the man page, as nowhere does it imply that you can't do this, and I implemented the feature when I found that it didn't work as I expected; other similar environment variables with which users may be familiar, such as EDITOR and VISUAL, already work like this.
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0005-Add-support-for-arguments-in-ALTERNATE_EDITOR-to-ema.patch