emacsclient path not symlinked as part of installation

[SreenivasVRao]

hi alex - many thanks for maintaining the emacs-snap :)

I did a clean-install of emacs / ubuntu 22.04 and had some trouble getting magit to use emacsclient.
Based on magit/with-editor#125 - I had to run this command:

sudo ln -s /snap/bin/emacsclient /usr/local/bin/emacsclient

would be helpful if this was added to the install workflow. unsure where it gets added or I'd have opened a PR

[alexmurray]

The snap should set up an automatic alias for emacsclient - can you list the output of: snap aliases? There should already be a symlink in /snap/bin/emacsclient.

[SreenivasVRao]

sreenivas@arceus:~$ snap aliases
Command              Alias        Notes
emacs.ebrowse        ebrowse      -
emacs.emacsclient    emacsclient  -
firefox.geckodriver  geckodriver  -
sreenivas@arceus:~$ 

[alexmurray]

Yep so the alias is there - and there should be a symlink in /snap/bin/emacsclient as well then. So from what I can see, the emacs snap is doing all that it can to ensure an emacsclient is in PATH - snaps are not able to write to /usr/local/bin so it is not feasible for the snap to add such a symlink. Do you know why with-editor is expecting such a symlink to exist?

[SreenivasVRao]

no sadly - just passing on what I found from the other issue, but looks like it may be a problem with with-editor in this case

[alexmurray]

I think it may be more likely a problem with your system - have you by chance manually compiled and installed emacs previously? If so, I suspect there may be symlinks left over in /usr/local/bin - can you please have a look?

ls -la /usr/local/bin/emacs*

[SreenivasVRao]

no - this is all on a fresh install of ubuntu 22.04 - only installed via snap

sreenivas@arceus:~/.config$ ls -la /usr/local/bin/emacs*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Mar 24 18:27 /usr/local/bin/emacsclient -> /snap/bin/emacsclient

[alexmurray]

Hmm weird - so I use magit myself and have never had any issues with it and the emacs snap. On my machine I see with-editor-emacsclient-executable has the value of /snap/emacs/2430/usr/bin/emacsclient - and I have no specific customisations for the with-editor package.

So I can only presume this is an issue with your local configuration... I'll close this issue since there isn't a lot we can do on the snap side of things but am happy to help you try and diagnose what is happening if you need.