bug#49195: Starting Emacs if required from emacsclient.desktop

[Peter Oliver]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2021, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2021 20:59:31 +0100 (BST)
> > From: Peter Oliver <p.d.oliver@mavit.org.uk>
> >
> > 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.
>
> FWIW, I would find this change surprising,

For someone to be unpleasantly surprised by this, they would need to launch 
emacsclient.desktop with the hope that it would fail because an Emacs daemon is 
not already running.  If they want it to fail, why would they try to launch it?

> and therefore would suggest to leave this off by default.  But that's me.

I’m not sure what off by default would mean in this context.  We’ll be 
providing emacsclient.desktop for the first time in Emacs 28, so users who 
prefer not to use it can carry on doing whatever they did before.

> > 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.
>
> How do you understand that?  My recollection was that there was no
> consensus on this, but my memory is not what it used to be.

I thought that replacing emacs.desktop with emacsclient.desktop, so as to 
always use emacsclient, was the controversial part.  Apologies if I got that 
wrong.

> > +  If you launch Emacs from a desktop environment, you may use the
>
> "Desktop environment" is too general.  You mean GNU/Linux desktop
> environment, and possibly just the ones compatible with
> freedesktop.org?  The text should make that clear.

I’ve made this more specific.  Thanks.  A revised version of the patch is 
attached.

> More generally, I'm not sure we should even say this in the Emacs
> manual, as these features belong to the desktop, not to Emacs.

This section of the manual already describes how to start Emacs from systemd, 
which isn’t part of Emacs either.

> What is the advantage of having this text in our manual?

I think that providing two different .desktop files is confusing enough to be 
worth commenting on.

> > +*** New desktop integration for connecting to the server.
> > +You may use the "Emacs (Client)" menu entry to open files in an
> > +existing Emacs instance rather than starting a new one.
>
> This isn't detailed enough, especially if we decide not to say
> anything about that in the manual.  And even if we leave that text in
> the manual, it is buried in a place where finding it isn't easy, so
> NEWS should be more detailed.

I’ve expanded this, but please let me know if you think there’s anything else 
that needs to be explained or isn’t clear; I’m aware that things that are 
obvious to the person who wrote a feature may not be obvious to others, but 
it’s hard to know exactly what.

--
Peter Oliver

0001-From-.desktop-files-reuse-a-frame-or-start-a-new-Ema.patch
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