Re: [h-e-w] gnuserv maintenance

[Lennart Borgman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jason Rumney" <address@hidden>
To: "Lennart Borgman" <address@hidden>
Cc: "David Vanderschel" <address@hidden>; <address@hidden>;
"Guy Gascoigne - Piggford" <address@hidden>
Sent: Saturday, October 30, 2004 11:25 AM
Subject: Re: [h-e-w] gnuserv maintenance


: "Lennart Borgman" <address@hidden> writes:
:
: > And yes I did have spec for emacsclient in my head. It looks like there
are
: > the same difficulties there since emacsclient has a switch --no-wait
(-n).
: > Maybe just adding -w would be the best there too. The differences
between
: > emacsclient and emacsclientw with regard to default behaviour must then
be
: > the same to get things working on ms windows.
:
: What exactly doesn't work when the default behaviour is to not wait?
:
: Previously David was confused and thought that DOS boxes would stay
: around for Explorer users, but with gnuclientw they don't. I have yet
: to see anyone put forward any other reason why gnuclientw needs to
: exit immediately.

I thought I made that clear in my compilation of facts, but here it is again
as far as I understands it:

- Gnuclientw is the preferred program to call from other program when Emacs
should act as an "edit server". The reason for this is that is has no
associated console window ("dos box"), since it is compiled as a windows
application (while gnuclient is compiled as a console application - and
those always has a console window).

Gnuclientw has to wait for the editing to finish and it does not do that by
default. Hence I suggested a new -w flag. The default behaviour to not wait
can not be changed unless we want gnuclientw processes hanging around on
some ms windows versions (NT, Win98 ...) when gnuclientw is used for drop
targets since the arguments specified in the drop target is not actually
used on those ms windows versions.


: Who knows what programs someone might want to use gnuclientw
: from. Some of them might have the same bug as Explorer Shortcuts on
: Windows 9x and NT where they cannot specify any arguments. I think it is
: more important that gnuclientw and emacsclient works for them than for
: it to exit immediately just because some people happen to like it as
: the default behaviour with no justification.

If programs with such bad behaviour shows up then maybe gnuclient can be
used for them?

Changing the behaviour of gnuclientw to wait by default also breaks
compatibility as David pointed out.

- Lennart