Re: [PATCHES] Fix some ‘guix edit’ bad assumptions.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mathieu Lirzin <address@hidden> skribis:

>   export VISUAL="emacsclient --alternate-editor=''"

I didn’t know that including arguments in $VISUAL was supposed to work.
Does it actually work with other programs?

> +          (let ((editor-args (string-split (%editor) #\space))
> +                (file-names  (append-map package->location-specification
> +                                         packages)))
> +            (match editor-args
> +              ((editor . args)
> +               (apply execlp editor (append editor-args file-names)))

The problem is that this doesn’t correspond to shell tokenization.
I think the right fix would be to do:

  (system (string-append editor (string-join file-names)))

so that the thing is invoked via /bin/sh.  (We must exit with the value
that ‘system’ returns.)

> Moreover I think that assuming a running emacs daemon by default if
> $VISUAL and $EDITOR are not set is not an obvious decision.  My first
> intuition would be to use GNU Nano which is often installed on GNU
> systems.  But after trying to edit a package with it... I have come to
> the conclusion that it was more reasonable to use 'emacs' instead.

It could also be Zile or whatever.  The thing is, whatever choice we
make, it remains a last resort, and something that may not actually
work.

> From 7988fd52a23811720c82f20b5b65eb527564a7f6 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Mathieu Lirzin <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2015 15:05:07 +0100
> Subject: [PATCH 2/2] edit: Don't assume that an emacs daemon is running.
>
> * guix/scripts/edit.scm (%editor): Use Emacs as a default value.

This is fine with me.

Thanks,
Ludo’.