Re: Adding with-editor to Emacs?

[Jonas Bernoulli]

Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> writes:

> Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li> writes:
>
>> Identifying the authors of the broken Emacs installations, contacting
>> them and explaining the issue to them, and then waiting for months/years
>> until the updates trickle down to users, was not an option.  I need a
>> solution now.  And this was such an exhausting experience, I did not
>> have the energy to *also* contact everyone who had messed up their Emacs
>> package.  And it is such a bad memory (it was the first time I got
>> massively attacked for publishing free software), that I am also not
>> volunteering to do that work now.
>
> Wow, what a ride.  I admire your patience, is all I can say.

Thanks.  Sometimes I have to vent a bit, even if I usually end up
regretting to have done so in public.  It helps to hear some
understanding words.  We've all been there, sometimes things just
get to stressful.

>>> Do you mean that emacsclient is installed in a place that just typing
>>> "emacsclient RET" at the shell prompt fails to run it?  If so, that's
>>> a broken installation, and Emacs shouldn't really try to fix that.
>>
>> I think this is a very reasonable for Emacs.  In other words, the best
>> course of action is to just forget the suggestion that with-editor is
>> added to Emacs.  There is no real need and nobody volunteering to do the
>> work anyway.
>
> It sounds like with-editor for the most part contains workarounds for
> broken Emacs installations?

That was the original feature but now it also contains a poorman's
substitute for emacsclient/server that works processes started from
Emacs (but also including processes running on remote machines).

As far as I am concerned, the package was done then.  Then requests to
support various emacs shells came in, and of course this could also be
useful for async-shell-command, and it became complex enough to warrant
a manual.  I wrote the in org and export it to texi, and of course once
(if) with-editor is added to Emacs, I will be informed that the
generated texi is not up to snuff....

This all started with a rather reasonable feature that just depended on
things not being broken, and then spiraled completely out of control,
with people asking me to add just add one more feature, again and again,
because after all with-editor would be the logical place to implement it.

Oh no!  Some memory is coming back.  When it was originally suggested
that we switch from "git commit -m 'done'" to "EDITOR=emacsclient git
commit", I agreed that this was obviously the right thing to do, but I
actually also realized that doing so would be risky and wanted to do it
slowly as an opt-in feature to avoid breakage, but everyone was "no no,
that is totally safe" and talked me into just pulling the plug.

So I hope you all understand now why I get a bit touchy when being
asked to work on this just a little more.

> Is there anything in use-package that does
> not belong to that category, and that you therefore think *should*
> really be fixed in Emacs?
>
> Perhaps it would be worth focusing on just that part.

(use-package?  I'll assume you meant with-editor.)

Replacing server-window with server-window-alist or something like that.