The attached patch adds support to emacsclient for command-line options when specifying the alternate editor, so that for example one can now say:

ALTERNATE_EDITOR="emacs -Q -nw"

I have added documentation to NEWS. It did not seem necessary to change the man page, as nowhere does it imply that you can't do this, and I implemented the feature when I found that it didn't work as I expected; other similar environment variables with which users may be familiar, such as EDITOR and VISUAL, already work like this.