Re: Pretest

["Juanma Barranquero" <lekktu@gmail.com>]

On 11/19/06, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:

> Could anybody summarize what is missing in order to make
>
> emacsclient --alternate-editor "emacs --eval '(server-start)'"
>
> work for this purpose?

If you do

  emacsclient -a "emacs --eval '(server-start)'" my-file.txt

and Emacs is running, Emacs will edit my-file.txt and emacsclient will wait.

If Emacs is not running, emacsclient will start Emacs (with the server
active) and pass it my-file.txt, but emacsclient won't have a
connection with Emacs so it won't wait for Emacs to finish.
emacsclient does not know (it never knew) how to start Emacs, then
wait for a while, then retry connection with it (which
gnuclient/gnuserv does, for example).

That is relevant if you're using emacsclient from a shortcut, or from
inside a program (for example, if you've set SVN_EDITOR to use Emacs
to edit Subversion commit logs, as I do).

There are a few related issues (quoting on the command line on
Windows, passing the server-name and server-file to Emacs if started
by emacsclient, not starting Emacs if the connection is not local,
etc.), but they're minor.

As it stands now, emacsclient is no less functional that it was before
the TCP changes. The behavior Lennart's trying to fix would happen
before. It is new (and very useful) functionality.

                    /L/e/k/t/u