Subject: bug#23576: [documentation] ‘Using Emacs as a Server’: ‘M-x set-variable RET server-name RET foo RET’

From: Dmitry Alexandrov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2016 22:25:38 +0300

Chapter 38 ‘Using Emacs as a Server’ in ‘GNU Emacs Manual’ says [0] the 
following:

     You can run multiple Emacs servers on the same machine by giving
     each one a unique “server name”, using the variable server-name. For
     example, M-x set-variable RET server-name RET foo RET sets the
     server name to ‘foo’.

[0] 
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Emacs-Server.html

First of all, ‘M-x set-variable RET server-name RET foo RET’ just does 
not work, returning “Value ‘foo’ does not match type string of 
server-name”.  It actually should be ‘M-x set-variable RET server-name 
RET "foo" RET’, since ‘server-name’ requires a string.

However, I found this example pretty confusing in general: when the 
server is not started yet, setting ‘server-name’ with ‘M-x set-variable’ 
is impossible (variable does not exist yet); when the server is already 
running, there is no much sense in setting it, since it does not rename 
the instance on-the-fly.

¿Would not it be more useful to give as an example of how to start 
multiple Emacs servers something like:

$ emacs --eval '(setq server-name "foo")' --daemon