Subject: 29.4; emacs.service failed with result 'timeout'

From: Patrick Nicodemus <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2024 13:22:30 -0400

I want to run Emacs as a service and connect to it with a client. I
followed the instructions here:

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

and ran the command
systemctl --user enable emacs

This apparently creates a file at
~/.config/systemd/user/default.target.wants/emacs.service

whose contents are:

[Unit]
Description=Emacs text editor
Documentation=info:emacs man:emacs(1) https://gnu.org/software/emacs/

[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/emacs --fg-daemon

# Emacs will exit with status 15 after having received SIGTERM, which
# is the default "KillSignal" value systemd uses to stop services.
SuccessExitStatus=15

# The location of the SSH auth socket varies by distribution, and some
# set it from PAM, so don't override by default.
# Environment=SSH_AUTH_SOCK=%t/keyring/ssh
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

The directions also say:
(If your Emacs was installed into a non-standard location, you may need
to copy the emacs.service file to a standard directory such as
~/.config/systemd/user/.)

I built this emacs distribution from source and installed it using "sudo
make install"; the executable is at /usr/local/bin/emacs, so I don't
think it is installed in a non-standard location, and so I did not
follow these instructions.

I modified the [Service] command above to include the -Q flag for the
purposes of this bug report.

After activating the service, restarting, etc., my journalctl output is
as follows:

Sep 07 12:52:45 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
emacs.service: start operation timed out. Terminating.
Sep 07 12:52:45 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
emacs.service: Failed with result 'timeout'.
Sep 07 12:52:45 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
Failed to start emacs.service - Emacs text editor.
Sep 07 12:52:46 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
emacs.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 1.
Sep 07 12:52:46 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
Starting emacs.service - Emacs text editor...
Sep 07 12:52:46 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 emacs[183514]:
Starting Emacs daemon.
Sep 07 12:54:16 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
emacs.service: start operation timed out. Terminating.
Sep 07 12:54:16 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
emacs.service: Failed with result 'timeout'.
Sep 07 12:54:16 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
Failed to start emacs.service - Emacs text editor.
Sep 07 12:54:16 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
emacs.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 2.
Sep 07 12:54:16 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
Starting emacs.service - Emacs text editor...
Sep 07 12:54:16 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 emacs[183623]:
Starting Emacs daemon.
Sep 07 12:55:46 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
emacs.service: start operation timed out. Terminating.
Sep 07 12:55:46 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
emacs.service: Failed with result 'timeout'.
Sep 07 12:55:46 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
Failed to start emacs.service - Emacs text editor.
Sep 07 12:55:47 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
emacs.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 3.
Sep 07 12:55:47 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 systemd[2704]:
Starting emacs.service - Emacs text editor...
Sep 07 12:55:47 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10 emacs[183684]:
Starting Emacs daemon.

etc., etc., every ninety seconds.

For some reason emacs is not successfully communicating to systemd that
it has launched successfully, and so systemd terminates emacs.

In GNU Emacs 29.4 (build 2, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.41,
 cairo version 1.18.0) of 2024-08-30 built on
 patrick-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-10
System Description: Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS

Configured using:
 'configure --with-native-compilation=aot --with-tree-sitter --with-gif
 --with-png --with-jpeg --with-rsvg --with-tiff --with-pgtk
 --with-imagemagick --with-x-toolkit=gtk3 --with-xwidgets'

Configured features:
ACL CAIRO DBUS FREETYPE GIF GLIB GMP GNUTLS GSETTINGS HARFBUZZ
IMAGEMAGICK JPEG JSON LCMS2 LIBSELINUX LIBXML2 MODULES NATIVE_COMP
NOTIFY INOTIFY PDUMPER PGTK PNG RSVG SECCOMP SOUND SQLITE3 THREADS TIFF
TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS TREE_SITTER WEBP XIM XWIDGETS GTK3 ZLIB

Important settings:
  value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8
  value of $XMODIFIERS: @im=ibus
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix

Major mode: Lisp Interaction

Minor modes in effect:
  tooltip-mode: t
  global-eldoc-mode: t
  eldoc-mode: t
  show-paren-mode: t
  electric-indent-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  tool-bar-mode: t
  menu-bar-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  font-lock-mode: t
  blink-cursor-mode: t
  line-number-mode: t
  indent-tabs-mode: t
  transient-mark-mode: t
  auto-composition-mode: t
  auto-encryption-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t

Load-path shadows:
None found.

Features:
(shadow sort mail-extr misearch multi-isearch emacsbug message mailcap
yank-media puny dired dired-loaddefs rfc822 mml mml-sec password-cache
epa derived epg rfc6068 epg-config gnus-util text-property-search
time-date mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 mailabbrev
gmm-utils mailheader cl-loaddefs comp comp-cstr warnings icons subr-x rx
cl-seq cl-macs gv cl-extra help-mode bytecomp byte-compile cl-lib
sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils rmc
iso-transl tooltip cconv eldoc paren electric uniquify ediff-hook
vc-hooks lisp-float-type elisp-mode mwheel term/pgtk-win pgtk-win
term/common-win pgtk-dnd tool-bar dnd fontset image regexp-opt fringe
tabulated-list replace newcomment text-mode lisp-mode prog-mode register
page tab-bar menu-bar rfn-eshadow isearch easymenu timer select
scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax font-core term/tty-colors
frame minibuffer nadvice seq simple cl-generic indonesian philippine
cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao
korean japanese eucjp-ms cp51932 hebrew greek romanian slovak czech
european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese composite emoji-zwj charscript
charprop case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help abbrev obarray oclosure
cl-preloaded button loaddefs theme-loaddefs faces cus-face macroexp
files window text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env
code-pages mule custom widget keymap hashtable-print-readable backquote
threads xwidget-internal dbusbind inotify dynamic-setting
system-font-setting font-render-setting cairo gtk pgtk lcms2 multi-tty
make-network-process native-compile emacs)

Memory information:
((conses 16 77452 8067)
 (symbols 48 7163 0)
 (strings 32 19673 2120)
 (string-bytes 1 600176)
 (vectors 16 15676)
 (vector-slots 8 327945 14726)
 (floats 8 44 40)
 (intervals 56 233 0)
 (buffers 984 12))