I have spent far too much time trying to get emacs to work within scratchbox, Across several different (-buntu) distributions I have run into the same error over and over again when trying to use emacsclient as detailed in the reference manual for 3.1. The error I keep getting is "Can't stat /tmp/esrv1000-maemo-desktop" (maemo is the user in this case because I'm using the maemo sdk image). The issue is explained and fixed here - emacs on the host operating system is creating a different file name from the one expected by the emacsclient included with scratchbox. The solution provided is editing the emacsclient binary, but I have no idea where the source code for it is.

help?

Has no one else (on these forums of course) ran into this problem? Really?!

Give it a bit of time. People on the forum are spread all over the world. Some of us do sleep...sometimes.

Hi notnarb ,

Yes, I'm running into the same problem ! Thanks for posting about it, it's the only answer I get from web search ... and it looks useful !
I've not tried yet, but I'll watch this thread ...

I found a workaround that doesn't involve recompiling the SDK:

1) Look at the error message from emacsclient to find out where it expects to find the socket file. In my case:

Can't stat /tmp/esrv1000-polydeb

(polydeb is my hostname)

2) Now start emacs outside scratchbox and do M-x start-server

3) Look in /tmp for the socket file that emacs actually creates. Mine was /tmp/emacs1000/server.

4) Create a symbolic link from the actual socket file to the file that emacsclient expects:

> ln -s /tmp/emacs1000/server /tmp/esrv1000-polydeb

Voila!