bug#61552: Feature request: Add variable Man-prefer-synchronous-call

[Sebastian Tennant]

Quoth Basil Contovounesios <contovob@tcd.ie>
on Thu, 16 Feb 2023 17:09:27 +0000:
> […]
> Please attach the patches here so that they can be tracked in this
> bugtracker.
>
> Thanks,

No problem Basil.  Here's a patch against master:

>From 179af66f885630a7bdf3d3f3146aceb8ad205ce6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Sebastian Tennant <sdt@sebyte.me>
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 08:36:04 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] Add user-customizable variable Man-prefer-synchronous-call

* lisp/man.el (Man-getpage-in-background): Only call #'start-process
when 'make-process satisfies #'fboundp AND Man-prefer-synchronous-call
is bound to nil.
---
 lisp/man.el | 9 ++++++++-
 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/lisp/man.el b/lisp/man.el
index 286edf9314e..fb4f8f02db7 100644
--- a/lisp/man.el
+++ b/lisp/man.el
@@ -97,6 +97,12 @@ man
   :group 'external
   :group 'help)
 
+(defcustom Man-prefer-synchronous-call nil
+  "Non-nil means always call the Un*x man command synchronously,
+rather than asynchronously, which is the default behaviour."
+  :type 'boolean
+  :group 'man)
+
 (defcustom Man-filter-list nil
   "Manpage cleaning filter command phrases.
 This variable contains a list of the following form:
@@ -1118,7 +1124,8 @@ Man-getpage-in-background
                                        "[cleaning...]")
                                      'face 'mode-line-emphasis)))
        (Man-start-calling
-        (if (fboundp 'make-process)
+        (if (and (fboundp 'make-process)
+                  (not Man-prefer-synchronous-call))
             (let ((proc (start-process
                          manual-program buffer
                          (if (memq system-type '(cygwin windows-nt))
-- 
2.30.2