bug#549: emacsclient or emacsclientw not waiting in Windows

[Vesa Suontama]

Hi,

thanks for clarification. It seems now that I was not testing
emacsclient at all, since now when I test it it works. I am very sorry
for misleading bug report.

I was not aware that emacsclientw does not wait, and thought that the
only difference there is that emacsclientw is compiled as windows
binary, which does not create (or use) a console.

This is quite sorry state of affairs, that windows needs to have
two emacsclient versions. (At least when the difference is not that
well or at all explained IMHO).

It would be interesting to know why you just cannot have one
emacsclient for windows? Would it be too complex to go around the
issue of having two emacsclient versions the same way as MS does (Yes,
I know this is insane, but look many MS utilities e.g. devenv).

It works like this: have emacsclient.com and emacsclient.exe, where
new emacsclient.exe is the old emacsclientw.exe, and emacsclient.com
is just a wrapper that calls the emacsclient and waits for it to
finish (e.g. by using a named event, which emacsclient.com waits).

Console programs use .com version by default (when only "emacsclient"
is called), and win32 uses .exe. We cannot directly rename
emacsclient.exe to emacsclient.com because there is a restriction that
com files can only be less than 64 kb.

The other way around could be to use "AttachConsole" etc. from
emacsclientw (and rename it to emacsclient), but all this is just guessing
as I do not know the real reason for emacsclientw.

I would like to hear from you, but understand if you are too busy.

Thanks for your help anyway.

BR,

Vesa

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lennart Borgman (gmail) [mailto:lennart.borgman@gmail.com]
> Sent: 14. heinäkuuta 2008 18:39
> To: Vesa Suontama; 549@emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com
> Cc: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: bug#549: emacsclient or emacsclientw not waiting in
> Windows
>
> Vesa Suontama wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have a Windows Vista SP1, and when using emacsclient or
> emacsclientw,
> > they always return immediately with return value 1, and do not wait
> > making it useless as EDITOR for command line utilities which should
> wait.
> >
> > I use the emacsclient from cmd.exe and not from cygwin. I also
> started
> > emacs with –q, and started server manually after that, so no startup
> > file should be causing this.
> >
> > Is this a known issue?
> >
> > Otherwise I love emacs :)
> >
> > Vesa
> >
> > In GNU Emacs 22.2.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.0.6001)
> >
> >  of 2008-03-26 on RELEASE
> >
> > Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 6.0.6001
>
>
> I do not have Emacs 22 here. However I just tested with CVS Emacs 23,
> both unpatched and the patched version that comes with Emacs+EmacsW32.
> I
> saw no problem, both emacsclient and emacsclientw waited as expected.
>
> Some notes:
>
> - Please use -Q (uppercase), not -q (lowercase). -q will still run
> site-start.el
>
> - If you test from a console window (running cmd.exe) then please note
> that emacsclientw can not make cmd.exe wait for it. I can't remember
> the
> technical terms for it but w here stands for "window, GUI". Program
> linked as GUI applications do not use a console window (by default).
> They can not write to a console and if started from a console the
> console will not wait for them.