Re: frame-environment

[Michael Ekstrand <michael@elehack.net>]

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Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com> writes:
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> What's the story with this function?  It doesn't exist, AFAICS, and
>> its two uses (in `environment' and `read-envvar-name') are commented
>> out.
>>
>> Without this function or something similar, the FRAME argument to
>> `environment' has no effect.  Unless this is for future extensions,
>> I'd suggest to remove it now, before it's too late.
>
> It sounds like an un-implemented or abandoned part of multi-tty.  If so,
> it should certainly be removed.

If this is removed rather than implemented, would that then mean that
there is no way to access the varying environments of frames under
multi-tty?

I have encountered a difficulty with Gnus, multi-tty, and GnuPG that I
have not yet taken time to investigate or do anything about; namely,
when I launch Emacs in my GUI environment, it has access to gpg-agent.
If I SSH in to that machine and connect to Emacs from the shell terminal
session, and try to send a GPG-signed mail, it fails, presumably because
it's trying to use the gpg-agent which is on a locked screen that I'm
not in front of.

It seems that this kind of functionality (sensing the environment of the
current frame), possibly augmented or replaced with the ability to
choose which Emacs process launches an inferior process, is necessary in
order to provide a solution to the problem I have described.

As I said, I have not taken the time to look in to this problem in depth
yet; I've just been working around it.  I just saw the message here and
wanted to make sure that these considerations were brought to light when
deciding what to do with this functionality -- when we have multiple
processes (with multiple environments and differing access to resources)
functioning as one Emacs, situations can arise where the environment of
the process a user is using to initiate a command is important.

I'm cross-posting this to the Gnus list so that the problem is now
brought to light there as well.

- Michael

-- 
mouse, n: A device for pointing at the xterm in which you want to type.
Confused by the strange files?  I cryptographically sign my messages.
For more information see <http://www.elehack.net/resources/gpg>.

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