Re: emacsclient 22 and 23 incompatibility

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

On Aug 1, 2009, at 15:58, CHENG Gao wrote:
> Apple's original installation of emacs 22 has (in /usr/bin):
>
> ,----
> | -r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel     38544  2  6  2008 emacs
> | -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  13072480 12 17  2008 emacs-i386
> | -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   5301856 11 25  2008 emacs-undumped
> `----
> Does this mean:
> the first emacs is dumped? How could it be so small?

% strings emacs
/usr/libexec/dumpemacs
Failed to dump emacs
/usr/bin/emacs-i386
execv(%s) failed
[...]

So I'm thinking Apple's "emacs" program doesn't come out of the normal  
GNU Emacs build process (or sources) at all, but does its own thing,  
which may involved dumping after installation.  If the dumped version  
is available as emacs-i386, then Apple's "emacs" will run it.  (If you  
fire up emacs and run "ps", you'll see the process listed as "emacs",  
but if you run "lsof" on it, you'll see the text image comes from  
emacs-i386.)

% file emacs-undumped emacs-i386
emacs-undumped: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
emacs-undumped (for architecture i386):	Mach-O executable i386
emacs-undumped (for architecture ppc7400):	Mach-O executable ppc
emacs-i386:     Mach-O executable i386
%

So "emacs-undumped" is probably a "universal" binary version of src/ 
temacs, which normally would never be installed, and "emacs-i386" is  
probably the dumped version, with only the native architecture  
support.  Though, how it could still be so much larger than both the  
pre-dumped version (divided roughly in half, remember, for the i386  
portion only) and the emacs-23 binaries you built, I don't know.

Ken