Re: patch to make emacs proceed if DISPLAY is unreachable

[Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>]

On 2006-03-07 16:30, Vivek Dasmohapatra <vivek@etla.org> wrote:
>On Tue, 7 Mar 2006, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> How about making this customizable then?
>>
>> I haven't had the time to look into the DISPLAY initialization parts.
>> If they are used before .emacs is loaded it may be a bit trickier than
>> what I initially thought.  But when users may want a diversion from the
>> default behavior, then a customizable option is what's called for, IMHO :)
>
> This happens well before any customisation. In fact, it happens before
> the lisp engine is started and we enter normal-top-level.

I remember the 'hack' we had to use for the 'visible-cursor option, so I
was sort of had expected this to be the case :-(

> 1) Command lines are parsed
>
> 2) if no display is required, the terminal is initialised
>
> 3) we enter elisp at normal-top-level
>
> 4) command-line is called :
>      NOW the elisp engine parses the command line and creates a GUI frame
>      if necessary, or defaults to using the terminal frame.
>
> Ideally, this could all be fixed after 4, unfortunaltely the terminal is
> already uninitialised/intialised at 2, so even if we make display
> failure non-fatal at 4, the terminal/frames aren't in the right state
> for us to use anyway.
>
> I worked around this by inserting the kludge at 1.5.
>
> It would require much more major surgery to make this subject to
> customisation, it's all quite deep down inside emacs.

I see.  Thanks for the explanation and the very fast reply.  Let us not
waste too much time & effort, possibly inserting bugs in the process
too, for making this a customizable option then.

I think our safest bet is to leave this up to the user, and keep using
the -nw command-line option for disabling any use of DISPLAY.

- Giorgos