At present, we provide emacs.desktop (which starts a new instance of Emacs), and emacsclient.desktop (which connects to an existing instance of Emacs).  This is problematic if a users wants to associate a particular file type with Emacs in their desktop file manager, because they canąt know in advance which will be correct.

Attached is a patch which enhances emacsclient.desktop so that it will start a new instance of Emacs if none is found to be running.  Users who like to reuse an existing Emacs can then always use emacsclient.desktop.

There was some discussion of how far to go with this on emacs-devel recently, but, if I understand correctly, the parts in this patch were not controversial.

-- 
Peter Oliver