The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 8, 2013 23:43 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix) by josh
Parent article: The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

You've just proven the point. Emacs uses client-side drawing and client-side fonts, like everything else these days. The only relevant applications left using core X drawing/font/etc primitives, or anything other than windows and pixmaps, are the X test suites.

Really? Xaw is a client-side drawing library, is it? 'cos my Emacs is using Xaw. It's using it because of a ten-year-old unfixed bug in Gtk whereby disconnecting from the X server, then shutting it down, then reconnecting to the new one, segfaults. Oops! This is... problematic for emacs --daemon usage, so anyone using that (anyone shutting their desktop down overnight and leaving their Emacs running on another machine) is still stuck using Xaw.

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The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 9, 2013 1:02 UTC (Sun) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

You specifically said "plus client-side fonts" in your description, so I assumed you ran a version of Emacs using client-side fonts.

Do you have a link for the GTK+ bug report about the segfault when connecting to a new X server?

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 9, 2013 5:46 UTC (Sun) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:05 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

This bug number is somewhat unusual among bugs since it is now wired into the Emacs source code in a warning printed whenever you try to use --daemon on a Gtk Emacs! It has caused a lot of trouble in the past...

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 5:05 UTC (Mon) by Russ.Dill@gmail.com (guest, #52805) [Link]

Wait...why are you running emacs over X? WTF?

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 8:19 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

A typical novice mistake. Everyone worth it's bits knows that The Right Way(TM) to do it is run X over Emacs.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 15:04 UTC (Mon) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]

Everyone worth it's bits knows that The Right Way(TM) to do it is run X over Emacs.

No, the right way is to use a shell connection (not X) into the machine in question and have it transparently shuffle the files into your local copy of Emacs.

For example, if you do C-x C-f /ssh:frodo@barad-dur.mordor.xxx:/mnt/doom RET then you'll get secure access to /mnt/doom as user frodo on host barad-dur.mordor.xxx without ever having to leave your local copy of Emacs.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 16:47 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

It was really foolish to allow anyone else write access to /mnt/doom. He really needed a better sysadmin.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 10, 2013 23:58 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (guest, #72404) [Link]

lol. Just finished up a re-read of the trilogy. Thanks for the chuckle :)

Take care,
-stu

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 11, 2013 3:06 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

TRAMP is great, but not always the best solution. At work I have a monster system. At home I have a mediocre system. I want to do compiling, debugging, etc. on my monster system--from within Emacs obviously. Also, I don't want to have to recreate my entire Emacs session at home: I can use emacsclient to bring up a remote frame in my at-work Emacs session, displayed on my system at home, and have all my buffers etc., even unsaved work, right there.

Distributed file access is important, but it's not the only thing.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 11, 2013 5:49 UTC (Tue) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

By default, these days TRAMP tries to start processes on the box the current buffer comes from. See https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/tramp.... Invoking M-x shell "from within" a tramp buffer will bring you a shell on the remote box, and invoking M-x compile will try to run the compile command there too (Emacs 23.4.1 as it comes with Debian, so nothing too recent here).

So it'd be worth to give that a try. That said, there are doubtlessly advantages to the remote X setup, which I do appreciate in other occassions.

For your case (keeping the session alive), Emacs server might be an option too.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:09 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Uh... unless you use TTYs exclusively, the Emacs server *relies* on remote X to pop up a frame on the screen in front of you rather than wherever it was started. It's not an alternative to remote X: it *is* remote X, just a rather more unusual variant in which one program can be connected to multiple X "Display"s simultaneously.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 20, 2013 18:28 UTC (Thu) by daglwn (guest, #65432) [Link]

My emacs 24 doesn't pop up frames when using TRAMP to invoke shells.

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 25, 2013 20:57 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Aaah. Sorry, I completely misread it and had everything turned around. You're right, of course. (And that's a nifty feature: how long's it been there, I wonder...)

The Wayland Situation: Facts About X vs. Wayland (Phoronix)

Posted Jun 18, 2013 11:04 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Do you mean "why am I running it remotely"? I'm running it on X to get lots of fonts and colours and keystrokes (I use shift, control, meta, super and hyper in different combinations and regularly wish there were more bucky bits!)

I'm running it remotely because the remote system (actually 'on the other side of my desk' on the other end of an unshared GbE connection, so not that remote) is faster than the local one, has ECCRAM where the local desktop (like most desktops) has normal RAM, has far *more* RAM which Emacs always likes, has the house RAID array local rather than over NFS, and is the machine that I don't shut down every night. Hence emacs --daemon is a lifesaver.

I cannot imagine that this is a particularly rare use case in these days of expensive power in Europe, given that desktops are often more power-hungry than headless servers. (Though it is true that perhaps not all that many people have a headless server at home, it's certainly not rare among developers, and among those developers a hell of a lot of them likely use remote X or would use something like it if it were available on their OS: remote headless servers are a lot less useful if you can't treat them 'mostly like your desktop' for worky stuff. But perhaps the Linux desktop is no longer targetted at developers?!)

As an aside, I do wish TuxOnIce hadn't gone moribund. I used to be able to suspend my desktop rather than shutting it down...