Re: GNU Emacs: Client/Server

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>  The fact that "emacsclient" does not build on MS Windows platform
>  (correct me if I am wrong), we end up depending on "gnuserv"
>  functionality. This is *NOT* part of distribution and therefore makes it
>  difficult to keep update with changes in "gnuserv" (if there are any,
>  recently).

I feel like the best way forward is to support TCP sockets rather than only
unix sockets.  This would be an improvement under Unix and would give us
W32 support "for free".

I opposed such a move in the past based on the fact that it implies
a serious security concern.  Of course, the security issue just means we
have to be super extra careful and do proper authentication.

Recently (while bitching at the stupid imap server that keeps asking for my
password even though I already authenticated myself elsewhere), it occurred
to me that a cheap authentication scheme is to see whether the remote
process has write access to a particular file: i.e. send a random string
to the remote process, and when the remote process replies, check whether
[ `cat ~/.server-check` = "$the-random-string" ].
Of course, the NFS propagation delay may make this unusable, but maybe
if we check [ -d "~/.server-$the-random-string" ] instead, it will work.


        Stefan