Re: [PATCH 0/5] Add systemd socket launching support.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Matthew.

On Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 09:16:37PM +0000, Matthew Leach wrote:
> Systemd has the ability to create a socket, launch a daemon upon
> connection to that socket and hand over the socket to the new process
> to handle.  In Emacs' case, we can delay the start of the Emacs daemon
> until emacsclient is called upon a socket.

Can we really?  What's the purpose of such a delay?

[ .... ]

> Feedback & comments welcome!

Systemd is a system initialisation program, one of several available.
It is highly controversial, and it is fairly obvious that one of its
aims is to subvert GNU's central position in the GNU/Linux system.  One
of its methods of proliferation is to persuade maintainers to code in
direct dependencies on systemd, thus imposing itself on anybody wishing
to run the program.  (Witness Gnome.) Emacs is a core GNU product, and
should remain equally accessible to all GNU users.

Emacs should not be talking directly to init systems.  There are
perfectly good, portable system level interfaces for talking to sockets,
and Emacs should restrict itself to using them.

Should your patch be accepted, it would lead to an Emacs version
specific to an initialisation system, a degree of fragmentation we've
not had before, as far as I know.

And the idea of making systemd dependency a default for building Emacs
seems somewhat on the far side of acceptability.

My vote is for not putting initialisation system specific code into
Emacs.

> Thanks,
> Matt

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).