emacsclient.emacs23 -a "" should start the daemon using emacs23, not emacs

[Ryan Thompson]

Binary package hint: emacs23

Emacs 23 and later have the neat feature of running as a daemon for emacsclient to connect to. Furthermore, emacsclient will automatically start a new daemon and then connect to it if one is not already running in the background, if you set the alternative editor to the empty string. That is, if you run emacsclient -a "" -c, emacsclient will either connect to an existing daemon or start a new one and connect to it. It starts the new one by running "emacs --daemon".

However, when I do emacsclient.emacs23 -a "" -c, instead of running "emacs --daemon", it should run "emacs23 --daemon".

This makes a difference for the purposes of window matching in programs like Docky.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Wed Jan 27 12:24:36 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
NonfreeKernelModules: wl nvidia
Package: emacs23-bin-common 23.1+1-4ubuntu3.1
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-18.55-generic
SourcePackage: emacs23
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-18-generic x86_64

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Ubuntu Karmic is end of life. Please try again using a newer version of Ubuntu. If it still fails, could you explain the scenario where this is important? "emacs23" points to /etc/alternatives/emacs so you can configure yourself which executable it will start.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for emacs23 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Ryan Thompson (rct86)]

This is still an issue in 12.04. The bug is important if you want to have multiple versions of emacs available, and you want to use daemon mode.

Suppose you have both emacs23 and emacs-snapshot installed, and /etc/alternatives/emacs points to /usr/bin/emacs23. In this case, any of the following commands will start an Emacs daemon using emacs23:

1. emacsclient -a "" -c
2. emacsclient.emacs23 -a "" -c
3. emacsclient.emacs-snapshot -a "" -c

Arguably, command number 3 should use emacs-snapshot to start the daemon. But instead all of them start /usr/bin/emacs, which points to /etc/alternatives/emacs, which points to /usr/bin/emacs23. To fix this, each version of emacs would have to be patched to use its own version-specific executable to start the daemon. This would ensure that the correct emacs version is always used to start the daemon.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Unfortunately, I can't reproduce this, since I can't find any other emacsclient than the one for emacs23:

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?searchon=contents&keywords=emacsclient&mode=filename&suite=precise&arch=any

In which package did you find the emacs-snapshot?