diary-mail-entries or mail race condition?

[Tim Connors]

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> >>>>> "Tim" == Tim Connors <tconnors at astro.swin.edu.au> writes:
> 
>     Tim> If I run diary-mail-entries, then quit xemacs immediately,
>     Tim> then I end up not getting the mail.  This didn't used to
>     Tim> happen, until we just upgraded the entire system (so timing
>     Tim> may be different now -- the mailer might be slower, or who
>     Tim> knows...)
> 
> There was a known bug in the stream handling code that under certain
> circumstances dropped data on the floor.  I believe this was fixed
> since the date on the version you have, but I can't find the relevant
> ChangeLog (in either 21.4 or 21.5) so I'm not sure.

http://xemacs.org/Releases/21.4.18.html
"Fix: When writing to another process, flush the last chunk, even when the 
pipe is blocked." ??

> Another possibility is that the standard mail-handling functions used
> to run the MTA asynchronously, and ignore the return code.  We had a
> spate of problems with lost mail, so we changed that to run it
> synchronously.  But that means that if you kill xemacs, you'll kill
> the mailer if it's still running.

Checking the system logs show that I don't think the mailer was ever 
invoked.  I could be missing something though.

> Is diary at the same version?  It may have been changed to do things
> in the background.

diary-lib.el just says:
;; Copyright (C) 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995 Free Software 
...
;;; (Mostly) Synched up with: FSF 20.5
;;; XEmacs has extra function `diary-countdown'

and is the same as the version I have working at home.

-- 
TimC
Anyone seeking the "Relativistic Quantum Mechanics" soft option
course, may wish to leave now. -- Intro lecture to RQM