Is `make-process' doing this?

[Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>]

Hi all,

just ran into this issue with starting external processes on Linux 
(I can't test if something similar happens on Windows or Mac OS).

Run `emacs -Q', start IELM (for convenience) and type:

IELM> (start-process "some-process" nil "evince" 
"~/path/to/some.pdf")

(Assuming that ~/path/to/some.pdf is an existing pdf file, of 
course). This brings up an evince window with the error message:

Unable to open document "file:///home/joost/~/path/to/some.pdf".

The point is that if I do this from a shell (either some terminal 
emulator, or even eshell or M-x shell in Emacs), it works fine. 
So:

~ $ evince ~/path/to/some.pdf

starts evince and opens the file without issue. 

So I was wondering if it is `make-process' that adds the 
"file:///home/joost/" part, or if it is evince, and if the latter, 
if there is something about `make-process' that keeps evince from 
recognising the argument as an absolute path inspite of the fact 
that it starts with a tilde.

More importantly, I was wondering if I should file a bug report or 
whether this is simply not guaranteed to work. (I modified my code 
to ensure that file names are always expanded with 
`expand-file-name' before being passed to `start-process'. Perhaps 
I should have been doing that all along.)

TIA


-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments