Emacsclient in Scratchbox

I am using Emacs to program both at work and home. When I found I can't use Emacsclient inside ScratchBox, although, it is claimed OK in the documentation, I felt a bit surprised. The error reads,

[sbox-DIABLO_ARMEL: /tmp] > emacsclient emacsclient-1.c
Can't stat /tmp/esrv1000-yenliang-laptop
[sbox-DIABLO_ARMEL: /tmp] > ls /tmp/esrv1000-yenliang-laptop
ls: /tmp/esrv1000-yenliang-laptop: No such file or directory

Obviously, the socket file /tmp/esrv1000-yenliang-laptop is not created by Emacs server. I looked into the source code of Emacsclient shipped from Emacs and found that the socket file it is looking for is /tmp/emacs1000/server as indicated by the code below.

sprintf(socket_name, "/tmp/emacs%d/%s",
                    (int)geteuid(), server_name);

But, the code in ScratchBox version is,

sprintf(server.sun_path, "/tmp/eserv%d-%s",
       (int)geteuid(), system_name);

I think if I change the socket file path above to match the one used by Emacs server and compiled a new emacsclient, it should work. And it does work.



The screenshot above says it works like a charm, though, the Emacs started the server is version 22.2, not CVS version. The emacsclient fails to connet to the server created by CVS version. My guess is that the CVS version returns the different ID as the client initializes the connection.

Another way you can try is to create a symbolic link at the home directory of the host pointing to the home directory in the ScratchBox system.

ln -s /scratchbox/users/$USER/home/$USER sbox