slow startup for xemacs on Darwin

[Hamish Macdonald]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Richard Cook <rcook at llnl.gov> wrote:

> I actually found out what xemacs is doing.  It is calling
> getaddrinfo("/tmp/launch-gcmVOm/org.macosforge.xquartz", ...);
> That comes from the DISPLAY name.  Why is it doing this, and can I tell it
> not to?  On Mac OS X, this is the weird name that DISPLAY gets set to to get
> direct rendering. It does not work to set DISPLAY to ":0".  I don't want to
> use DISPLAY="rcmac.llnl.gov:0" because that will cause it to hit the NIC
> instead of go straight to the card for rendering.
>

Hmm...  Just checked on my Mac.   The display name is set to
"/tmp/launch-TkSI95/org.x:0".  That's a really curious format for a "local"
display string.  On my Mac, when I run "xterm" under X, that file is a local
socket.  A local transport mechanism like that should really not have a
colon in it.  This appears to confuse some software into thinking it is a
"hostname:0" display variable format, so it tries to lookup "hostname".

I still agree with others that your DNS is broken; if it cannot come back
and tell you quickly that the hostname
"/tmp/launch-gcmVOm/org.macosforge.xquartz" can't be resolved, its broken.

However, I wonder why xemacs is trying to resolve this address.  Local X
applications on my system don't appear to do a DNS lookup when I use a
display name like "/tmp/foo/bar/baz:0", so why does xemacs?  Is it possible
that either XEmacs is not using the locally installed XLIB library?  Is
XEmacs performing its own interpretation of the DISPLAY environment variable
(that would be a bad idea).

Regards,
 Hamish.