Re: Adding with-editor to Emacs?

[Jonas Bernoulli]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li>
>> Cc: stefankangas@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org
>> Date: Sat, 02 Sep 2023 20:12:40 +0200
>> 
>> > Then I guess you should describe all those atrocities in detail, so
>> > that we could perhaps devise ways of handling it.
>> 
>> I do not have a list of those atrocities and I do not have the bandwidth
>> and motivation to compile that in the next few months.  I have code that
>> deals with it though (with-editor-locate-emacsclient and the functions
>> it uses).  Using git to trace the history of that code, would give you
>> commits with explanations and/or links to places were the issues that
>> are being addressed were described.
>
> It's not that easy: AFAIU, with-editor was part of Magit, and was
> separated into a repository of its own not very long ago.  And the
> answers to my questions seem to be before the split.

That doesn't really complicate the archaeology, we would just have to
run "git log ..." twice instead of just once.  But yes, the history
is more ancient as the first casual "git log ..." in the with-editor
repository suggests.

> I also looked at the present code and found it to have quite a few
> non-trivial parts whose purpose I couldn't easily explain or guess,
> and which are not explained in the comments, either.

Yes and IMO it would even be fair to say the code is a bit weird, and
we likely could do a better job by first listing all the cases we have
to address and then start over.  Doing that would also risk breaking
something that was previously fixed.

> So, if you have no time or motivation to describe the problems you
> tried to solve with that code, I guess someone else will need to find
> out and describe the problems in a way that we could then consider for
> inclusion.  I cannot myself afford digging through the Magit's Git
> repository to find the description of these problems, sorry.

I don't expect you to do that.  And you don't expect me to do it either.
If someone else decides to do it, that would be great, but if not,
that's what it is.

That would change once a (future) package that is part of Emacs, needs
to something like with-editor's emacsclient kludge or the additional
features it provides.

Until then, I think we can shelve this.  Hell, I might even one day
decide to produce the list myself after all.  But for the last few
months "just one more thing" has just kept popping up, and I really want
to finally get around to work on the things that I actually want to work
on again.  It has been a while.

The server-window-alist thing is a different story, and as you said,
should be handled separately.  But that too is "just one more thing"
in a long sequence of "just one more"...

(Hm, in February I got a bit burnouty and took a break, which did
wonders.  It seem I am again approaching a point where that is the
logical course of action.  Sorry, if some of my "don't assign me any
more work, I did not volunteer" was a bit rude.)

> Or maybe Richard already knows the answers, since he thought this
> should be added to Emacs.