Subject: bug#2176: Observations on the splash screen - and signal-process

From: [email-masked] (Kim F. Storm)
Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2009 19:08:34 +0100

Severity: wishlist

[ resent from
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-01/msg00697.html ]

If auto-save files are found during startup, the splash screen says:

If an Emacs session crashed recently, type Meta-x recover-session RET
to recover the files you were editing.

Some comments on this:

1) Shouldn't "Meta-x" be "M-x" here ?

2) Couldn't we make this a "clickable" "Recover Session" button
   like the Open file... instead of the text?

3) Maybe rephrase it to something like:

One or more Emacs auto-save files exists; click [RECOVER] to review the
sessions and possibly recover the files you were editing at that time.

4) It was wrong...

Actually, I didn't have any crashed session - but I have another Emacs session
running which has created an auto save file.  

Maybe emacs should check the saved sessions and filter out the
currently running sessions ...  
A simple (signal-process PID 0) would suffice -- unfortunately, the
doc string for signal-process does not describe the return value
in this case (currently it is 0 if the process exists and -1 otherwise
- but better return values would probably be t or nil).

BTW, the elisp manual doesn't mention that the signal can be a symbol
as well as a number (signal names are portable, numbers are not!!)

Finally, wouldn't it make sense if (signal-process PID nil) checked for
the existense of process PID - using signal 0 is probably non-portable.

-- 
Kim F. Storm <[email-masked]> http://www.cua.dk