--- /dev/null
+This file describes various problems that have been encountered
+in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
+
+* On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
+
+Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
+the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
+sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
+
+* Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
+
+Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
+
+* Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
+the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
+
+This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
+libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
+shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
+similiar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
+
+The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
+the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
+
+The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
+installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
+
+* On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
+
+ /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
+
+The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
+
+The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
+
+* Self documentation messages are garbled.
+
+This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
+with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
+corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
+
+* M-x shell immediately responds "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
+
+This is often due to inability to run the program `env'.
+This should be in the `etc' subdirectory of the directory
+where Emacs is installed, and it should be marked executable.
+
+* Trouble using ptys on AIX.
+
+People often instll the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
+Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
+
+* Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
+
+christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
+
+The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
+execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
+tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
+but tty is giving it back 3.
+
+The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
+word:
+
+if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
+
+should be changed to:
+
+if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
+
+Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
+and into .login.
+
+* Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
+
+Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
+
+* Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
+* `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
+
+One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
+your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
+the environment.
+
+* Emacs starts in a directory other than the one that is current in the shell.
+
+If the PWD environment variable exists, Emacs uses this variable as
+the initial working directory.
+
+Some shells automatically update this variable, while other shells fail
+to do so. If you use two such shells in combination, the variable can
+end up wrong. This confuses Emacs.
+
+The solution is to put something in the start-up file for the shell
+that does not update PWD, to get rid of that environment variable.
+For example, in csh, use `unsetenv PWD'.
+
+* Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
+
+If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
+`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
+that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
+with a floating point option other than the default.
+
+It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
+crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
+However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
+floating point option: to decide at run time what hardware is
+available.
+
+* Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
+
+The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
+arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
+tell Emacs to compensate for this.
+
+I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
+whether this problem is present on a given system.
+
+* Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
+ as a concentrator.
+
+This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
+7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
+
+* M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
+
+This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
+version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
+
+* Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
+ terminal type.
+
+The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
+environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
+provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
+emulates.
+
+Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
+in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
+it only if it is undefined.
+
+ if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
+
+Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
+happen in a non-login shell.
+
+* Error compiling sysdep.c, "sioctl.h: no such file or directory".
+
+Among USG systems with TIOCGWINSZ, some require sysdep.c to include
+the file sioctl.h; on others, sioctl.h does not exist. We don't know
+how to distinguish these two kind of systems, so currently we try to
+include sioctl.h on all of them. If this #include gets an error, just
+delete it.
+
+* X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
+
+People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
+not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
+the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
+the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
+
+You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
+However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
+you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
+
+The easy way to do this is to put
+
+ (setq x-sigio-bug t)
+
+in your site-init.el file.
+
+* Problem with remote X server on Suns.
+
+On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
+may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
+is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
+As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
+
+* Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
+
+These control the actions of Emacs.
+~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
+EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
+"load" will search.
+
+If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
+of them, then try again.
+
+* Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
+
+You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
+
+ Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
+
+This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
+Here is how to make more of them.
+
+ % cd /dev
+ % ls pty*
+ # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
+ % /etc/crpty 8
+ # creates eight new pty's
+
+* Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
+
+This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
+Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
+
+It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
+space available on the machine.
+
+On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
+subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
+for large blocks (many pages).
+
+* test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
+* or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
+* or, temacs runs and dumps xemacs, but xemacs totally fails to work.
+* or, temacs gets errors dumping xemacs
+
+This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
+fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
+binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
+
+In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
+It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
+a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
+itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
+when unpacking the shell archive.
+
+I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
+what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
+file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
+
+The only verified ways to transfer GNU Emacs are `tar', kermit (in
+binary mode on Unix), and rcp or internet ftp between two Unix systems,
+or chaosnet cftp using raw mode.
+
+If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
+nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
+
+ 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
+ 2) Delete all the .elc files.
+ 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
+ You might as well save the old alloc.o.
+ 4) Remake xemacs. It should work now.
+ 5) Running xemacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
+ to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
+ You may need to increase the value of the variable
+ max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
+ on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
+ 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
+ and remake temacs.
+ 7) Remake xemacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
+
+* temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
+
+This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
+files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
+space than was allocated.
+
+This could be caused by
+ 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
+ 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
+ 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
+ Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
+ if you have received Emacs from some other site
+ and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
+ deleting that file.
+ 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
+ (not from the directory you expected).
+ 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
+ This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
+ loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
+ 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
+ the space required.
+
+If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
+of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
+
+But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
+of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
+problem.
+
+* Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
+
+You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
+Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
+will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
+and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
+
+* The dumped Emacs (xemacs) crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
+
+Two causes have been seen for such problems.
+
+1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
+as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
+it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
+value in the man page for a.out (5).
+
+2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
+initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
+of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
+not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
+may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
+
+* Compilation errors on VMS.
+
+You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
+variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
+This is not an error. Ignore it.
+
+VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
+were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
+
+There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
+in conditional expressions. The bug is:
+ char c = -1, d = 1;
+ int i;
+
+ i = d ? c : d;
+The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
+conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
+constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
+
+* rmail gets error getting new mail
+
+rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
+called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
+the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
+
+There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
+the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
+`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
+this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
+the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
+IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
+SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
+
+If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
+prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
+you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
+`mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
+
+ chgrp mail movemail
+ chmod 2755 movemail
+
+* Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
+* GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
+
+Some people have found that Emacs was unable to connect to the local
+host by name, as in DISPLAY=prep:0 if you are running on prep, but
+could handle DISPLAY=unix:0. Here is what tale@rpi.edu said:
+
+ Seems as
+ though gethostbyname was bombing somewhere along the way. Well, we
+ had just upgrade from SunOS 3.5 (which X11 was built under) to SunOS
+ 4.0.1. Any new X applications which tried to be built with the pre
+ OS-upgrade libraries had the same problems which Emacs was having.
+ Missing /etc/resolv.conf for a little while (when one of the libraries
+ was built?) also might have had a hand in it.
+
+ The result of all of this (with some speculation) was that we rebuilt
+ X and then rebuilt Emacs with the new libraries. Works as it should
+ now. Hoorah.
+
+If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
+then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
+do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
+or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
+that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
+be careful not to lose the others.
+
+Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
+
+#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
+
+Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
+the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
+again to say this:
+
+#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
+
+* Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
+
+This means that Control-S/Control-Q "flow control" is being used.
+C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes away
+C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long streams
+of text without user commands, there is no need for a user-issuable
+"stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a properly designed
+flow control mechanism would transmit all possible input characters
+without interference. Designing such a mechanism is easy, for a person
+with at least half a brain.
+
+There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
+
+ 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
+ 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
+ 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
+
+First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls
+whether they generate flow control characters. This must be
+set to "no flow control" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes
+there is an escape sequence that the computer can send to turn
+flow control off and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string
+should turn flow control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
+
+Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
+needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
+by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
+rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
+your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
+it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
+the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
+problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
+to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
+
+For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
+giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
+codes. You might as well try it.
+
+If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
+through a concentrator which sends flow control to the computer, or it
+insists on sending flow control itself no matter how much padding you
+give it. You are screwed! You should replace the terminal or
+concentrator with a properly designed one. In the mean time,
+some drastic measures can make Emacs semi-work.
+
+One drastic measure to ignore C-s and C-q, while sending enough
+padding that the terminal will not really lose any output.
+Ignoring C-s and C-q can be done by using keyboard-translate-table
+to map them into an undefined character such as C-^ or C-\. Sending
+lots of padding is done by changing the termcap entry. Here is how
+to make such a keyboard-translate-table:
+
+ (let ((the-table (make-string 128 0)))
+ ;; Default is to translate each character into itself.
+ (let ((i 0))
+ (while (< i 128)
+ (aset the-table i i)
+ (setq i (1+ i))))
+ ;; Swap C-s with C-\
+ (aset the-table ?\C-\\ ?\C-s)
+ (aset the-table ?\C-s ?\C-\\)
+ ;; Swap C-q with C-^
+ (aset the-table ?\C-^ ?\C-q)
+ (aset the-table ?\C-q ?\C-^)
+ (setq keyboard-translate-table the-table))
+
+An even more drastic measure is to make Emacs use flow control.
+To do this, evaluate the Lisp expression (set-input-mode nil t).
+Emacs will then interpret C-s and C-q as flow control commands. (More
+precisely, it will allow the kernel to do so as it usually does.) You
+will lose the ability to use them for Emacs commands. Also, as a
+consequence of using CBREAK mode, the terminal's Meta-key, if any,
+will not work, and C-g will be liable to cause a loss of output which
+will produce garbage on the screen. (These problems apply to 4.2BSD;
+they may not happen in 4.3 or VMS, and I don't know what would happen
+in sysV.) You can use keyboard-translate-table, as shown above,
+to map two other input characters (such as C-^ and C-\) into C-s and
+C-q, so that you can still search and quote.
+
+I have no intention of ever redisigning the Emacs command set for
+the assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. This
+flow control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need
+it are bad merchandise and should not be purchased. If you can
+get some use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, I am glad,
+but I will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems
+for the sake of inferior systems.
+
+* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
+
+For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
+control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
+terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
+that wants to use flow control.
+
+You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
+If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
+flow control, as described in the preceding section.
+
+If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
+into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
+shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
+
+* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
+
+Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
+control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
+On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
+control on the local system.
+
+One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
+(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
+stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
+"stty start u stop u" will do this.
+
+Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
+around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
+issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
+
+* Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
+
+This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
+terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
+the combination of features specified for that terminal.
+
+The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
+Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
+(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
+terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
+what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
+and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
+There are several possibilities:
+
+1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
+
+In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
+need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
+
+2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
+ of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
+ by termcap.
+
+This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
+Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
+and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
+classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
+Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
+tested on many kinds of terminals.
+
+3) The termcap entry is wrong.
+
+See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
+that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
+for certain terminals.
+
+4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
+ right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
+
+This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
+in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
+
+* Output from Control-V is slow.
+
+On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
+Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
+to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
+before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
+the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
+it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
+
+If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
+that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
+specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
+concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
+send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
+fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
+time as the operations really take.
+
+Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
+at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
+terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
+operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
+flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
+an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
+Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
+cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
+not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
+is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
+
+Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
+multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
+termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
+fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
+each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
+to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
+`cm' string.
+
+You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
+has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
+take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
+
+A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
+of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
+
+* Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
+
+The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
+
+ *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
+ aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
+
+This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
+
+* You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
+
+Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
+after a day or two.
+
+The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
+the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
+character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
+of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
+overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
+to it.
+
+For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
+and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
+other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
+but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
+that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
+important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
+
+If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
+you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
+ (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
+You may then wish to put the function help-command on some
+other key. I leave to you the task of deciding which key.
+
+* Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
+It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
+but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
+causes it.
+
+ There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
+ call in the RFS server.
+
+ The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
+ close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
+ many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
+ to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
+
+ This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
+
+ The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
+ non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
+ gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
+ a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
+ as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
+ is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
+ protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
+
+ (as always, your line numbers may vary)
+
+ % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
+ RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
+ retrieving revision 1.2
+ diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
+ *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
+ --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
+ ***************
+ *** 163,169 ****
+ /*
+ * No return sent for close or fsync!
+ */
+ ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
+ proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
+ else
+ {
+ --- 166,172 ----
+ /*
+ * No return sent for close or fsync!
+ */
+ ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
+ proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
+ else
+ {
+
+* ld complains because `alloca' is not defined on your system.
+
+Alloca is a library function in 4.2bsd, which is used very heavily by
+GNU Emacs. Use of malloc instead is very difficult, as you would have
+to arrange for the storage to be freed, and do so even in the case of
+a longjmp happening inside a subroutine. Many subroutines in Emacs
+can do longjmp.
+
+If your system does not support alloca, try defining the symbol
+C_ALLOCA in the m-...h file for that machine. This will enable the use
+in Emacs of a portable simulation for alloca. But you will find that
+Emacs's performance and memory use improve if you write a true
+alloca in assembler language.
+
+alloca (N) should return the address of an N-byte block of memory
+added dynamically to the current stack frame.
+
+* Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
+
+You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
+
+ foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
+ foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
+
+These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
+Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
+may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
+on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
+in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
+can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
+that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
+
+As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
+you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
+can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
+should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
+array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
+ Lisp_Object *args;
+ ...
+ ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
+putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
+ Lisp_Object *args;
+ Lisp_Object tem;
+ ...
+ tem = args[i];
+ ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
+causes the problem to go away.
+The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
+so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
+
+* 68000 C compiler problems
+
+Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
+These are some that have been observed.
+
+** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
+This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
+if x is of type Lisp_Object.
+
+** "cannot reclaim" error.
+
+This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
+line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
+simpler expressions.
+
+** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
+
+If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
+Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
+
+struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
+
+lose (arg)
+ struct foo arg;
+{
+ test ((int *) arg.y);
+}
+
+If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
+In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
+((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
+
+This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
+of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
+
+* C compilers lose on returning unions
+
+I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning
+a union type. Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return
+type Lisp_Object, which is currently defined as a union.
+
+This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
+of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
+
HCoop / bpt / emacs.git / commitdiff