Re: A few questions about desktop.el

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

On 6/9/07, Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> wrote:

> Overwriting the desktop of another Emacs instance is not a good thing to do.

Well, that's exactly what happens without this patch.

> Not writing the desktop would be acceptable if it displayed a message
> about this failure.

What is the exact use case?

> Another alternative is to write the desktop file with a different name.

You can already do that, with or without the patch. The patch offers
you the alternative of detecting the conflict when you run the second
Emacs instance, so you chose not to load the desktop, and then
manually set another name for it or create it in another directory.

> All on all, we could leave this to the user's discretion.  The user should be
> careful about not creating a configuration where two Emacs instances
> automatically write to the same file.

I'm not sure what this means: are you proposing not installing the
patch? Because the point (to me anyway) is not having a configuration
where two instances write to the same file, but detecting the case
when that happens by accident.

The patch is very useful and works quite well (though I've added it an
option to configure whether the second instance should automatically
overwrite a conflicting desktop file, automatically skip loading it,
or ask the user, instead of always asking as Davis' original patch
does).

I propose installing it and seeing what other people thinks of it.

             Juanma