setting start-process environment, too much GC, debugging XEmacs
Nix suggests:
(start-process doesn't seem to support running programs with
different environments yet, but that can't be too terribly hard to add,
and is of general utility.)
(let ((process-environment an-appropriately-constructed-list))
(start-process ...))
(Untested but should work.) I prefer that idiom rather than
cluttering up the start-process API even more than it already is.
(Why is XEmacs-21.5.27 choosing to garbage-collect between every word
I
type? If this is how the incremental GC normally works it's damned
annoying. Yes, each GC round only takes about a second, but still, that's
an unresponsive second every two seconds...)
Dunno. I don't use the new GC yet. File a bug report where Marcus
will see it (M-x report-xemacs-bug).
One aside: if XEmacs goes into a tight loop, how do I debug it?
I entered a newsgroup a few minutes ago and XEmacs wandered off
computing madly, GCing occasionally, and never came back.
The backtrace was, ahem, unhelpful:
Build with --with-union-type. Source src/.gdbinit. Type "lbt"
anywhere to get a Lisp backtrace, "lbp count" in frame #4 to find out
how many characters were deleted, and "pobj buf" in frame #2 to get a
peek at the internal structures of the buffer being munged.
The requirement for --with-union-type is an infelicity that appeared
post-3.3 GCC; it used to be that GDB could get at the LISP_CHAR_TYPE
macro, but for some reason it can't now. So in disunion builds, pobj
can't determine the type of the object, and nothing much works.
(I'm considering just oprofiling it next time to get a clue what
functions the loop is passing through: would that be a worthwhile
approach?)
It might be.
FWIW, there's known breakage in the regexp code that can lead to
looping; it's claimed that simply incrementing the target text pointer
under certain conditions where there is a null match DTRTs, but I've
never been able to convince myself.
Gnus (I assume you're using Gnus to read newsgroups) does a lot of
weird stuff trying to make XEmacs appear to be GNU Emacs to its higher
level code. I find Gnus code unreadable, and it's rarely commented,
so I've not even been able to formulate a bug report or RFE.
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