Re: Some findings and suggestion about Emacs on w32

[Guy Gascoigne-Piggford]

> A major difference is that in CVS emacs, emacsserver is now INTERNAL
> written in ELisp via make-network-process.  I.e. only emacsclient is
> an external program.
>
> AFAIK emacsclient uses a local unix socket, gnuclient uses a mailslot.
>
>  

That was the case for a windows only version of gnuclient that Nico 
Francois put out at some point in 1996/1997.  At about the same time I 
took a copy of the latest gnuserve that I could find on the net , which 
was a version by Peter Breton modified from the version that Andy Norman 
originally wrote ( I'm not sure if this was based on emacsclient code, 
or just based on the same idea).  I got rid of the mailslot support and 
ported the Unix socket code over to NT.  This gave us a version of 
gnuserve that worked compatibly from Unix to NT.  I've found this 
feature very useful since this version allows connections to be made 
over a network from a  telnet or xterm on a Unix machine to an Emacs and 
gnuserv on an NT machine.

So I took Andy Norman's stock Unix version and ported the socket code 
over to NT (coincidentally this seems to work on Win9x).  To this I 
added some of the NT specific stuff from Peter Breton & Nico Francois' 
version.

This seems to be the version of gnuclient that appears to be most 
commonly referenced when talking about to gnuserve on NT, you still 
sometimes hear about the mailslot version of gnuserve but I don't know 
if it's actually available on the net easily any longer (I do still have 
a copy if anyone needs it BTW).

And to complcate all of this, the XEmacs folks have a completely 
difference gnuclient port, same original code base, but diverged a long 
time ago.  The lisp is XEmacs specific and the protocol has changed from 
the other version.

Anyway, I'm still trying to get an emacs build enviroment on my NT box 
(that's an entertaining waste of a weekend), Oh the joys of tools that 
can't cope with varied line endings :(

Anyway, some time later I'll see what needs to be done to get 
emacsclient working.  Then I guess I'll find all of the reasons why I 
started using gnuclient.

Off to google for all of the previous discussions of this issue.