Switched to profile 23.0, now can't open emacs in X[SOLVED]

[sl70]

Hi, after I messed up my whole system by ignoring the news item about grub-install, when the profile 23.0 news came out I was very careful to follow the excellent instructions to the letter. Everything seems OK but now I can't get emacs to open in an X frame, only a tty frame (which sucks very badly). I have been using emacs in X for 30 years or thereabouts and have never had this problem.
I tried

re-emerging emacs
removing the cairo USE flag (when I was running the giant emerge @world step I had to add cairo for some other package, but I guess that had nothing to do with this issue)
tried running it with emacsclient -c
ran emacs --debug-init .emacs

probably other things I can't remember now. Nothing works.

I depend on emacs for my work using dev-lang/R as an inferior process in emacs. Without it I'm lost.

I'd very much appreciate any help.

[kgdrenefort]

Hello,

Could you please provide an output, error message on anything to start debugging this behavior please ?

What error(s) do you see while attempting to run emacs into your X session ?

Maybe that link could help you out: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Cheat_Sheet#Package_troubleshooting

Also, you said:

[sl70]

[kgdrenefort]

What does this command return:

[Hu]

As an uninformed guess based on how gvim can get into a similar situation: is $DISPLAY set properly in the terminal from which you start emacs? Some programs, such as vim, will automatically fall back to rendering in the terminal if they fail to connect to X. If instead of emacs, you run xmessage Hello (or some other trivial X using program), what happens?

What is the output of emerge --pretend --verbose emacs? You may need to vary the package name, depending on whether /usr/bin/emacs is provided by app-editors/emacs or some other package, such as app-editors/xemacs. If in doubt, use equery belongs to find the package that owns the program emacs.

[sl70]

[sl70]

[spica]

[sl70]

[Hu]

That depends on the application. Some programs, such as console vim, can connect to and use an X server, despite not creating an X window of their own. In the case of Vim, running vim with access to the X server allows it to natively interact with the X clipboard, but still render in a terminal. If emacs has a similar feature, then while unusual, USE="X -gui" is not a contradiction.

Personally, I think it would be nice if trying to force emacs into GUI mode while built with USE=-gui would generate a nice clear error message like "This emacs was built without GUI support. You cannot enable the GUI." and then exit, instead of showing the behavior you reported here. Vim does this:

[sl70]

[Hu]

Yes, I recognized that I was bringing up Vim in an Emacs thread, but it was the first program that came to mind that exhibited the special circumstances I wanted to suggest could explain why Emacs was behaving as it did. The opportunity to shame Emacs by showcasing Vim's superior error reporting was merely a happy accident.

[sl70]

This was my first experience with the gui USE flag so I decided to set it globally and then do emerge -N @world. The only packages that got rebuilt were emacs, emacs-common, and cmake. Can't figure out why cmake would use gui but....

[wjb]

[Hu]

That is different though. You cite a notice in the ebuild, which the administrator will only observe by reading the log messages from src_configure. If the administrator obtains a prebuilt emacs (and therefore does not run src_configure), or ignores ebuild log output, then this message will not be seen. The example I showed is that the installed Vim specifically recognizes that the user (who may or may not even be the person who installed vim) requested a GUI, and prints a diagnostic telling you that it lacks GUI support. The only ways the user can fail to see this message are by discarding stderr or by not explicitly invoking a GUI (and instead trusting the program to imply a GUI by default). In some fairness to emacs, it is not clear to me that any of the OP's attempts to get emacs into GUI mode were the equivalent of vim -g, so maybe there exists some emacs invocation that would force emacs to display a GUI or display an error. I see that emacs -nw was suggested, which I assume is an explicit request for a GUI, but it's not clear that OP tried that.

[sMueggli]

You can build Emacs with GUI or without. If you build Emacs with a GUI you can choose between X11 and Wayland (pure GTK). And that makes it quite complicated to figure out the correct USE flag combination.

[wjb]