I have been running emacs (x11 version, unwittingly) on wayland without realizing there is a wayland-specific version of emacs. My desktop has started spontaneously going apeshit and crashing. So my first move was to run emacs this way:

$ emacs --fg-daemon
$ emacsclient -c

The idea was that when the display manager goes to shit, I don’t lose my shit. I should be able to simply reattach to my emacs session by running emacsclient -c. Starting the emacs server yields this msg:

Warning: due to a long standing Gtk+ bug¹ https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/221 Emacs might crash when run in daemon mode and the X11 connection is unexpectedly lost. Using an Emacs configured with --with-x-toolkit=lucid does not have this problem.

Yikes. Note the keyword might crash. So there is an arbitrary chance of survival. So then I discovered there is a wayland-specific version of emacs (emacs-pgtk). Installing it on debian required removing the original X11 version of emacs and resolving some dependency issues by not installing some pkgs. Fine, I did that. Now when I run emacs-pgtk as a server, it starts with:

Due to a limitation in GTK 3, Emacs built with PGTK will simply exit when a display connection is closed. The problem is especially difficult to fix, such that Emacs on Wayland with multiple displays is unlikely ever to be able to survive disconnects.

Fuck. So now when wayland crashes or is shut down, there is no chance of recovery. WTF? I was perhaps better off running the X11 version on wayland, where there is at least a non-deterministic chance of recovery.

¹ Apparently gitlab.gnome.org is an exclusive access-restricted website, so I am blocked from even reading about the bug.

  • evenwichtOPEnglish
    1·
    9 hours ago

    Do you know off-hand what that entails? I ran this in Debian:

    $ apt-cache depends emacs
emacs
 |Depends: emacs-gtk
 |Depends: emacs-lucid
  Depends: emacs-nox

$ apt-cache depends emacs-gtk | grep gtk
emacs-gtk
  Depends: libgtk-3-0

    (edit) found the following, which implies that I need to compile emacs myself:

    https://gist.github.com/abelardojarab/f4c154f1aa4e15fe6b97a8cfc2010022

    The --with-x-toolkit=lucid option was also mentioned in the warning output of the daemon of the x11 version of emacs.

    It would be interesting to know if any platform already builds emacs that way. Would be nice if repology.org tracked that but I doubt it does.