"Helmut" == Helmut Eller e9626484@stud3.tuwien.ac.at:
Helmut> Daniel Barlow dan@telent.net writes:
Opinions? You can get attachtty as part of detachtty, in Debian, FreeBSD ports, or from http://www.cliki.net/detachtty
Helmut> Are you aware that CVS Emacs has support for Unix sockets? It Helmut> does server socket too.
Helmut> I don't know why people are so keen to use a setup where the Helmut> Lisp and Emacs are on different machines, but whenever I tried Helmut> to do something like that (e.g, with remote-compile) it didn't Helmut> work very well and I always run Emacs on the same machine. Is Helmut> this a feature we want to support or is this a Helmut> would-be-nice-in-an-ideal-world thing?
Many good reasons have already been listed in this thread, I'll add another one: virtual machines. I routinely use UML (User-Mode Linux) and VMware to run stuff. Now there is also Xen on the horizon, which is supposed to virtualize with marginally small performance loss.
If you wonder why one would want to run a Lisp in a virtual machine, think snapshots, versioning, copy-on-write, experiments. Plus, the day UML or Xen gets software suspend-to-disk support, I'm moving all my life inside it. Just imagine a permanent, suspendable, migratable environment, where you do not have to reset your programming environment just because your USB drivers chose to pull the machine down with them.
So, I'll pitch in: yes, there are good reasons to support a remote Lisp.
--J.