Re: Emacs making questions while starting in daemon mode

[Óscar Fuentes]

Dan Nicolaescu <address@hidden> writes:

>>>> 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
>>
>> This is precisely to avoid the case where emacs asks for user input
>> while initializing, isn't it?
>
> More precisely is to prevent the user from shooting himself in the foot.

In this case, the user did nothing stupid. It is emacs' fault if some
package asks the user about something on circunstances where it is not
appropiate.

emacs -Q is a very limited experience. If I had to use -Q with --daemon
I would ditch --daemon at once.

>> If you start emacs --daemon from KRunner, for instance, there is no
>> visible console. (KRunner is a KDE tool used for executing applications
>> by its name. I guess Gnome has something similar.)
>
> What happens if you start any other program that requires tty input in
> the same conditions?

KRunner & friends does not show a tty. `less some-file', for instance,
detects that it does not have a tty and just terminates. Apparently it
is the same case for other tools, although not for vim in text mode.

Adding `emacs --daemon' to init scripts is problematic for the same
reason. Usually, daemons are started by init scripts, which run
unattended. Is it considered okay for a daemon to ask questions while
starting?

>>>> 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")?
>>
>> "yes" and "no" can express very different intentions depending on the
>> question ("are you sure you want to launch the ICBM?" "start process for
>> establishing world peace?") C-g means "cancel," which arguably can cause
>> confussion too, but less so, I hope.
>
> What does C-g mean for `yes-or-no-p'?

Abort?

> How hard it is to do something that the user does not expect based on that?

I'm not saying that C-g is the rigth response. It is just much better
than hanging.