Subject: Emacs compilation mode prevents child processes from spawning/forking daemons

From: Paul Pogonyshev <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2015 10:58:33 +0200

This can be reproduced with Gradle, but you don't need a Gradle project for
this. When running from a normal console:

    $ gradle
    Starting a new Gradle Daemon for this build (subsequent builds will be
faster).

    :help
    ...
    Total time: 2.014 secs

Now if I repeat it, the daemon is reused, so the first message is gone and
the "build" goes much faster:

    $ gradle
    :help
    ...
    Total time: 0.495 secs

By comparison, when run from Emacs M-x compile, Gradle starts daemon every
time, so all builds look like the first example above. However, if daemon
already exists (e.g. created by console run above), it will not be killed.

File '~/.gradle/daemon/VERSION/daemon-PID.out.log' for daemons spawned
after M-x compile ends with this line:

    Daemon vm is shutting down... The daemon has exited normally or was
terminated in response to a user interrupt.

When daemon is allowed to exist (e.g. when run from a normal console), log
receives this message instead:

    ... Daemon is idle, sleeping until state change or idle timeout at ...

Additionally, I checked several other ways to run process from Emacs:

    * M-x eshell: daemon is killed, as with M-x compile
    * M-x shell: daemon works properly
    * M-!: daemon works properly

So, it seems that Emacs has a way to keep daemons alive / not kill them,
but it is not used in compilation mode.

Paul