bug#65902: 29.0.92; emacsclient-mail.desktop fails due to complicated escaping

[sbaugh@catern.com]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: sbaugh@catern.com
>> Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2023 02:30:08 +0000 (UTC)
>> 
>> This patch avoids the complicated scripting needed for
>> emacsclient-mail.desktop by adding a new flag to emacsclient, --funcall,
>> which mirrors emacs --funcall and allows emacsclient-mail.desktop to be
>> basically the same as emacs-mail.desktop.
>> 
>> I expect this to also be useful in other places; the need to escape
>> arbitrary inputs before passing them to emacsclient is frequently
>> annoying.
>
> Is quoting the only issue with --eval?  If so, why not have a variant
> of --eval that quotes the argument by itself, like you do in the
> patch, i.e. by using quote_argument, instead of inventing yet another
> weird option with its own small DSL and extra-special rules of how to
> write the command line with it?

I am not sure what you're suggesting.  Can you show how the equivalent
of:

emacsclient --apply message-mailto -- %u

would work with that design?

> More generally, I cannot say I'm happy that we basically are
> reiterating everything that was said in bug#57752 instead of picking
> up where it left off.  Why is it useful to have another discussion
> like that one (which will probably end up at the same impasse)?

I admit I didn't see that bug until now, but the way in which this is
different is that I have now read the discussion, incorporated all the
advice, and I'm actually implementing it :)

Probably these bugs could/should be merged though.