Re: Emacs making questions while starting in daemon mode

[Óscar Fuentes]

Dan Nicolaescu <address@hidden> writes:

>> I'm thinking on the case where there is no terminal, or you can not
>> assume that there is a human watching it.
>
> If there's no terminal, the only absolutely safe way is to use:
> emacs -Q --daemon

This is precisely to avoid the case where emacs asks for user input
while initializing, isn't it?

>>> This assumes that there's a default correct answer to any of these
>>> questions, which is doubtful.
>>
>> The absolutely wrong answer is to hang until the user figures out that
>> emacs' initialization froze and starts pulling his hair about the
>> cause. Then, if the cause is on emacs's own code, he needs to find a
>> workaround.
>
> Can you show a case where it's hanging?  It should not detach from the
> tty until .emacs is processed.

If you start emacs --daemon from KRunner, for instance, there is no
visible console. (KRunner is a KDE tool used for executing applications
by its name. I guess Gnome has something similar.)

>> IMO, an acceptable "answer" on those cases is to act as if the user
>> pressed C-g to abort the question, leave some notice on *Messages* and
>> keep going with the initialization.
>
> How is that different than having a default answer of "no" (or "yes")?

"yes" and "no" can express very different intentions depending on the
question ("are you sure you want to launch the ICBM?" "start process for
establishing world peace?") C-g means "cancel," which arguably can cause
confussion too, but less so, I hope.

>> Is there a predicate that tells if emacs is initializing?
>
> after-init-time might be, depends on what you need.

Thanks.