🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, thsi does not qualify as a bug in the sense of something not acting as
advertised, but it is a problem that should perhaps be addressed. The Emacs
built-in function start-process allows one to set many options, but setting
the process filter is not one of them. This means that there is a race
condition between starting the process and setting a filter on it. This does
not matter much for some processes (e.g., loadst, since it will produce output
again after a while if you wait) but it matters greatly for others (e.g.,
invoking hostname to get the current host's name). Granted, there *are* kludgy
workarounds, such as "sh -c cat < /dev/null; hostname", which hangs until you
send an eof to the cat, but it's pretty distasteful and hard for someone to
devise on their own.

My suggestion is to be able to set the process filter as an optional
additional argument to start-process. This should be upwardly compatible and
simple to implement. How about it?
--

		J. Eliot B. Moss, Assistant Professor
		Department of Computer and Information Science
		Lederle Graduate Research Center
		University of Massachusetts
		Amherst, MA  01003
		(413) 545-4206; Moss@cs.umass.edu