Re: Pretest?

[David Kastrup]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     By the way, do you actually use emacsclient/server yourself?
>
> No, I don't use it.  I have only occasionally tested it.
>
> I wonder about the statement that emacsclient is always invoked at
> specific user request.  Indeed, that is usually so, but is it always
> so?  As usage becomes more diverse, I expect it will cease to be
> true.

Why?  Does your system tend to asynchronously pop up editors which
you, as the user, did not request by some particular interaction?

I never have experienced anything like that.

The only case where one might be having second thoughts is for the
_multi-tty_ branch: there it might be nice to not have the home
display changed when one has connected via emacsclient from work in
between.  However, this is completely unfeasible due to Emacs' lack of
multi-threading terminals: at some point of time, top-level will get
executed in the remote tty, anyway.

So I can't see where you get your ideas about typical usage of
emacsclient, and it does not particularly help that you state that you
don't actually use it, in contrast to the people reporting their
expected behaviors.

Perhaps you are thinking that one will use
emacsclient --eval
for doing some noninteractive system task in some asynchronous manner.
However, it would be an awful mistake to do this with an interactive
Emacs session since the state of such a session and the files it may
have open (including password-protected files in different accounts
accessed via tramp) are completely unknown.

In spite of its name, emacsclient is very much restricted to behaving
like an interactive _editor_.  Using it for noninteractive
non-user-initiated tasks would not be feasible.  If you really wanted
to build a system service executing Elisp based on it, you'd start an
Emacs of its own, non-interactively, detached from a tty.

We can't even do that in Emacs 22.  So please let us not base our
defaults on some weird case that is not likely to become the default
usage in future and can't even be usefully employed in that manner in
Emacs 22.

-- 
David Kastrup