Re: Questions about XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and server-socket-dir

[Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz>]

On 2019-02-04 16:30, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> You can always restart the server with another --eval, right?

I think that would be closing the stable door after the horse has
bolted, if the default socket had potentially been clobbered in
the interim :)


> Only because yours is a very convoluted arrangement, not typical
> of "normal" usage.

Oh absolutely.  (Although I believe others will find the script useful
as well once I've released it more generally, so it might become at
least slightly less abnormal.)


> Defcustoms are supposed to be customized from init
> files, not controlled by environment variables from outside of Emacs.

It's only the fact that separate instances can conflict with one
another's sockets which makes me want this, because that's rather an
awkward issue which (in my convoluted arrangement) isn't reliably
addressed by init files simply because I'm not imposing any particular
requirements on init files (and users might run 'emacs -q' in any
case).  Enforcing the separation of server instances really needs some
kind of external support.


>> (I do still think a EMACS_SOCKET_DIR environment variable would be a
>> beneficial addition, as the current code doesn't facilitate this.)
> 
> We don't need a variable to set a directory when we already have one
> for setting the file name, which could include leading directories.

I can only reiterate that this doesn't cover my particular use-case;
but that's ok, as it seems that setting XDG_RUNTIME_DIR will be a
workaround for that.  If I find that I need to revisit this question,
I'll provide more context.

Shall I raise a bug report for the fact that emacs ignores that existing
(EMACS_SOCKET_NAME) environment variable?


-Phil