Subject: Re: bug#49195: Starting Emacs if required from emacsclient.desktop

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2021 09:07:01 +0300

> Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2021 20:59:31 +0100 (BST)
> From: Peter Oliver <[email-masked]>
> 
> Attached is a patch which enhances emacsclient.desktop so that it will start a new instance of Emacs if none is found to be running.  Users who like to reuse an existing Emacs can then always use emacsclient.desktop.

FWIW, I would find this change surprising, and therefore would suggest
to leave this off by default.  But that's me.

> There was some discussion of how far to go with this on emacs-devel recently, but, if I understand correctly, the parts in this patch were not controversial.

How do you understand that?  My recollection was that there was no
consensus on this, but my memory is not what it used to be.

> +  If you launch Emacs from a desktop environment, you may use the

"Desktop environment" is too general.  You mean GNU/Linux desktop
environment, and possibly just the ones compatible with
freedesktop.org?  The text should make that clear.

More generally, I'm not sure we should even say this in the Emacs
manual, as these features belong to the desktop, not to Emacs.  What
is the advantage of having this text in our manual?

> +*** New desktop integration for connecting to the server.
> +You may use the "Emacs (Client)" menu entry to open files in an
> +existing Emacs instance rather than starting a new one.

This isn't detailed enough, especially if we decide not to say
anything about that in the manual.  And even if we leave that text in
the manual, it is buried in a place where finding it isn't easy, so
NEWS should be more detailed.

Thanks.