Subject: Re: bug#50849: 28.0.50; Proposal for Emacs daemon to signal when being busy

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2022 15:02:58 +0200

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

>> What would be a reasonable timeout here?  Say...  five seconds?
>
> Too short, IMO.  I'd say 10 (and expose this as a Lisp variable, so
> whoever is unhappy about the default can do what they want).

Makes sense.

But I'm slightly leery about having a default timeout at all -- I can
imagine that there are people using emacsclient as an RPC thing to
control an Emacs automatically, and in that case, any timeout would be
wrong: It's more important to have a reliable mechanism than anything
else.  (And in that scenario, the Emacs daemon might well be busy for a
long time, if you have a script that just feeds commands to the
daemon...)

But on the other hand, it's nice to give the user some more feedback
there than just hanging.

Hm...

Might it make sense to use the timeout to just output a message on
stdout saying "Unable to contact the server; use `C-c' to break" or
something?  Instead of just exiting/erroring out?

Anybody have opinions here?