bug#549: emacsclient or emacsclientw not waiting in Windows

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Vesa Suontama wrote:
> Hi,
>
> thanks for clarification. It seems now that I was not testing
> emacsclient at all, since now when I test it it works. I am very sorry
> for misleading bug report.
>
> I was not aware that emacsclientw does not wait, and thought that the
> only difference there is that emacsclientw is compiled as windows
> binary, which does not create (or use) a console.

Just to not confuse any readers:
emacsclientw.exe does wait. You can see it in Window Task Manager. 
However the console window does not wait for emacsclientw.exe since it 
is not a console app.

> This is quite sorry state of affairs, that windows needs to have
> two emacsclient versions. (At least when the difference is not that
> well or at all explained IMHO).

You can always use emacsclient.exe if you want to. The drawback is that 
you will see an extra console window for each invocation of it.

> It would be interesting to know why you just cannot have one
> emacsclient for windows? Would it be too complex to go around the
> issue of having two emacsclient versions the same way as MS does (Yes,
> I know this is insane, but look many MS utilities e.g. devenv).
>
> It works like this: have emacsclient.com and emacsclient.exe, where
> new emacsclient.exe is the old emacsclientw.exe, and emacsclient.com
> is just a wrapper that calls the emacsclient and waits for it to
> finish (e.g. by using a named event, which emacsclient.com waits).

Please try to write some code for this so we can test it.

> Console programs use .com version by default (when only "emacsclient"
> is called), and win32 uses .exe. We cannot directly rename
> emacsclient.exe to emacsclient.com because there is a restriction that
> com files can only be less than 64 kb.
>
> The other way around could be to use "AttachConsole" etc. from
> emacsclientw (and rename it to emacsclient), but all this is just guessing
> as I do not know the real reason for emacsclientw.

If you know how to do this then please try writing some code for that so 
we can test that. This may be a better solution than the one above.

> I would like to hear from you, but understand if you are too busy.
>
> Thanks for your help anyway.
>
> BR,
>
> Vesa
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Lennart Borgman (gmail) [mailto:lennart.borgman@gmail.com]
> > Sent: 14. heinäkuuta 2008 18:39
> > To: Vesa Suontama; 549@emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com
> > Cc: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> > Subject: Re: bug#549: emacsclient or emacsclientw not waiting in
> > Windows
> >
> > Vesa Suontama wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I have a Windows Vista SP1, and when using emacsclient or
> > emacsclientw,
> > > they always return immediately with return value 1, and do not wait
> > > making it useless as EDITOR for command line utilities which should
> > wait.
> > > I use the emacsclient from cmd.exe and not from cygwin. I also
> > started
> > > emacs with –q, and started server manually after that, so no startup
> > > file should be causing this.
> > >
> > > Is this a known issue?
> > >
> > > Otherwise I love emacs :)
> > >
> > > Vesa
> > >
> > > In GNU Emacs 22.2.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.0.6001)
> > >
> > >  of 2008-03-26 on RELEASE
> > >
> > > Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 6.0.6001
> >
> > I do not have Emacs 22 here. However I just tested with CVS Emacs 23,
> > both unpatched and the patched version that comes with Emacs+EmacsW32.
> > I
> > saw no problem, both emacsclient and emacsclientw waited as expected.
> >
> > Some notes:
> >
> > - Please use -Q (uppercase), not -q (lowercase). -q will still run
> > site-start.el
> >
> > - If you test from a console window (running cmd.exe) then please note
> > that emacsclientw can not make cmd.exe wait for it. I can't remember
> > the
> > technical terms for it but w here stands for "window, GUI". Program
> > linked as GUI applications do not use a console window (by default).
> > They can not write to a console and if started from a console the
> > console will not wait for them.