Re: Emacs making questions while starting in daemon mode

[Dan Nicolaescu]

Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> writes:

> Dan Nicolaescu <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> notice the question and emacs sits there forever waiting for an
>>> answer. From the POV of the user, the emacs daemon hangs.
>>
>> If "emacs --daemon" asks a question when starting, one should be able
>> to answer it from the terminal, the same way it is done when emacs is
>> started in batch mode.
>
> I'm thinking on the case where there is no terminal, or you can not
> assume that there is a human watching it.

If there's no terminal, the only absolutely safe way is to use:
emacs -Q --daemon

>> In general such a question is due to what the user has in .emacs, we
>> can't really prevent the user from shooting himself in the foot.
>>
>>> Maybe all the features that request input from the user should bail out
>>> if they are invoked while in daemon mode and there is no console nor
>>> frame where to interact?  I'm thinking of y-or-n-p, ask-user-about*,
>>> read-from-minibuffer, read-password, etc
>>
>> This assumes that there's a default correct answer to any of these
>> questions, which is doubtful.
>
> The absolutely wrong answer is to hang until the user figures out that
> emacs' initialization froze and starts pulling his hair about the
> cause. Then, if the cause is on emacs's own code, he needs to find a
> workaround.

Can you show a case where it's hanging?  It should not detach from the
tty until .emacs is processed.

> IMO, an acceptable "answer" on those cases is to act as if the user
> pressed C-g to abort the question, leave some notice on *Messages* and
> keep going with the initialization.

How is that different than having a default answer of "no" (or "yes")?

> Is there a predicate that tells if emacs is initializing?

after-init-time might be, depends on what you need.