[3625] in testers
emacs crashes and irregularities
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, n/BSG)
Thu Jun 18 13:54:19 1998
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 13:53:50 -0400
From: tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, n/BSG)
To: testers@MIT.EDU
On a Sun (both Sparc 4 and Ultra 1) running athena release 8.2, the
emacs in the packs crashes under X in a reliable way on startup if I
drag out initial windows in a certain way. (Other ways, it starts
with no apparent problems.)
When I have a running X emacs, it misses many redisplays, with the
result being that the display is never really up to date--in fact, it
misses redisplay after any single keystroke, so things like RMAIL and
gnus are intolerable; isearch is unusable, and writing text only works
if I ignore the screen.
No such failures happen with the same emacs in tty mode--it only
happens with X.
Emacs has not yet been officially ported to Solaris 2.6, but that
should not pose a problem. However, if you just configure emacs, it
happens that it will default to using the Solaris 2.4 config files if
it doesn't recognize the version. I suspect that this is what
configure did when emacs was built for 8.2. The build directory
should be checked to see which s/ file it used (sol2-4.h or sol2-5.h).
(I will submit a bug report suggesting that the default be changed,
and that it track the most recent OS version known.)
I'm quite certain that this is related to the OS upgrade, because the
emacs version is identical in 8.1 and 8.2. When I run the old 8.1
emacs on an 8.2 machine, the same failures happen, but if I run the
8.1 emacs on an 8.1 machine, it works fine. This suggests that some
difference between Solaris 2.5 and 2.6 needs attention from emacs and
is not getting it.
There are some bug reports mentioned in the emacs PROBLEMS file that
relate to Solaris bugs and kernel or library patches, in version 2.5.
It's not at all unlikely that Sun did the Wrong Thing with respect to
one or more of these 2.5 patches in producing 2.6. In looking over
the list, I see some possible candidates, but lacking any knowledge
about the details of what changed in 2.6, I can't know what's
relevant.
Thomas
