Re: emacsclient startup messages

[Pedro Andres Aranda Gutierrez <paaguti@gmail.com>]

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I remember the controversy with emacs as daemon, emacsclients and
friends...

hmmm... from a user's perspective I really don't know what I gain by having
emacs running as a daemon if I boot up my laptop to say watch a film or
listen to a recording from my satellite PVR just for the fun of it.

Maybe this sounds like a very old user or a very old and very bad habit
(mea maxima culpa) but when I want to edit, I write emacs or emacslient on
my CLI or click on the emacs icon or drag-and-drop a file on the emacs icon
and then emacs stays alive as long as I want it to stay alive. Because,
yes, I do watch films and that is somehow not very compatible with writing
(code or whatever). Or am I too monotask? ;-)

Best, /PA

On Fri, 5 Nov 2021 at 18:52, Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org> wrote:

> >>>>> On Fri, 05 Nov 2021, Jim Porter wrote:
>
> > On 11/5/2021 2:40 AM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >> $ emacsclient -t --alternate-editor=
> >> emacsclient: can't find socket; have you started the server?
> >> emacsclient: To start the server in Emacs, type "M-x server-start".
> >> Another Emacs daemon is already running at process id 6084
> >> Error: server did not start correctly
> >> Error: Could not start the Emacs daemon
> >> $
>
> > Why are you (or the Gentoo package) running with `--alternate-editor='
> > if a daemon was already started?
>
> Because the user may not be sure if a daemon is running, and may want to
> start it just in case? Which fails with the patch applied.
>
> Note that the Gentoo package only starts the daemon, calling emacsclient
> is up to the user. I'm not keen to receive bug reports because users'
> workflows are being broken. (In fact, broken again, as we already had a
> round of that with Emacs 27).
>
> > [...]
>
> > As for my personal opinion on this, I think it would be best to revert
> > bug#33847 (which supports the Gentoo use-case). If necessary, we could
> > provide a way to explicitly opt into the (insecure) bug#33847
> > behavior, e.g. by adding a --fall-back-to-tmpdir-sockets flag. I'm
> > also ok with my compromise patch, even though it's not perfect.
>
> Not helpful. :(
>
> The main problem with XDG_RUNTIME_DIR ist that it doesn't persist
> between login sessions:
>
> | The lifetime of the directory MUST be bound to the user being logged
> | in. It MUST be created when the user first logs in and if the user
> | fully logs out the directory MUST be removed. [...] Files in the
> | directory MUST not survive reboot or a full logout/login cycle.
> |
> |
> https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html#variables
>
> In contrast to that, an Emacs running as a daemon can survive logout,
> and the user may want to reconnect to it later. This is impossible if
> the socket is located in XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, which is scrapped upon logout.
>
> In bug #33847 I had suggested to create the socket in ${HOME}/emacs.d/
> instead. Unfortunately this was shot down, with the arguments summarised
> in <https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=33847#100>:
>
> | This would be worse for several reasons: you'd need to disambiguate
> | via hostname, you'd need to guarantee hostnames are unique, you'd have
> | problems when NFS is flaky or hanging in your home directory, and
> | you'd need to deal with socket files that survive OS crashes.
>
> I still don't think that any of these arguments is substantive:
>
> - Unix sockets use the file system just as a namespace, which is unique
>   on any given host. The socket itself is local; there is no sharing
>   across hosts. Therefore I believe that creating a single socket would
>   be enough.
>
> - Flaky NFS shouldn't be a problem, because once the communication is
>   established, the filesystem is no longer involved in it. (Of course,
>   there may be NFS problems at the time of startup, but then again,
>   Emacs cannot read the user's local config either.)
>
> - A stale socket will just use a single inode, and can be reused the
>   next time the server is started.
>


-- 
Fragen sind nicht da um beantwortet zu werden,
Fragen sind da um gestellt zu werden
Georg Kreisler

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