Known Problems with GNU Emacs
Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
- 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
+ 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010
Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end of the file for license conditions.
* Crash bugs
+** Emacs crashes when running in a terminal, if compiled with GCC 4.5.0
+This version of GCC is buggy: see
+
+ http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=6031
+ http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=43904
+
+You can work around this error in gcc-4.5 by omitting sibling call
+optimization. To do this, configure Emacs with
+
+ CFLAGS="-g -O2 -fno-optimize-sibling-calls" ./configure
+
** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
server that results in an endless loop. This is not fixed in any known
Gtk+ version (2.14.4 being current).
-** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes on startup on Cygwin.
-
-A typical error message is
- ***MEMORY-ERROR***: emacs[5172]: GSlice: failed to allocate 504 bytes
- (alignment: 512): Function not implemented
-
-Emacs supplies its own malloc, but glib (part of Gtk+) calls memalign and on
-Cygwin, that becomes the Cygwin supplied memalign. As malloc is not the
-Cygwin malloc, the Cygwin memalign always returns ENOSYS.
-
-One workaround is to set G_SLICE=always-malloc before starting emacs.
-For example, in bash,
-
- G_SLICE=always-malloc emacs
-
-or put
-
- export G_SLICE=always-malloc
-
-in one of the bash startup files. This also has to be done before
-building emacs on Cygwin with Gtk+.
-
* General runtime problems
** Lisp problems
** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
+*** Metacity: Resizing Emacs or ALT-Tab causes X to be unresponsive.
+
+This happens sometimes when using Metacity. Resizing Emacs or ALT-Tab:bing
+makes the system unresponsive to the mouse or the keyboard. Killing Emacs
+or shifting out from X11 and back again usually cures it (i.e. Ctrl-Alt-F1
+and then Alt-F7). A bug for it is here:
+https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/231034.
+Note that a permanent fix seems to be to disable "assistive technologies".
+
*** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM.
This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later
* Runtime problems on character terminals
+** The meta key does not work on xterm.
+Typing M-x rings the terminal bell, and inserts a string like ";120~".
+For recent xterm versions (>= 216), Emacs uses xterm's modifyOtherKeys
+feature to generate strings for key combinations that are not
+otherwise usable. One circumstance in which this can cause problems
+is if you have specified the X resource
+
+ xterm*VT100.Translations
+
+to contain translations that use the meta key. Then xterm will not
+use meta in modified function-keys, which confuses Emacs. To fix
+this, you can remove the X resource or put this in your init file:
+
+ (xterm-remove-modify-other-keys)
+
** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
(using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system).
-*** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC versions
-
-Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
-reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time. In
-addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
-info. Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
-compiling Emacs. GCC versions 4.0.3, 4.0.4, 4.1.1, and 4.1.2
-reportedly build a working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend
-these GCC versions. Note that these versions of GCC, 4.0.3, 4.0.4,
-4.1.1, and 4.1.2, are currently the _only_ versions known to succeed
-in building Emacs (as of v22.1).
+*** Building Emacs for Cygwin can fail with GCC 3
+
+As of Emacs 22.1, there have been stability problems with Cygwin
+builds of Emacs using GCC 3. Cygwin users are advised to use GCC 4.
+
+*** Building the native MS-Windows port fails due to unresolved externals
+
+The linker error messages look like this:
+
+ oo-spd/i386/ctags.o:ctags.c:(.text+0x156e): undefined reference to `_imp__re_set_syntax'
+ collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
+
+This happens because GCC finds an incompatible header regex.h
+somewhere on the include path, before the version of regex.h supplied
+with Emacs. One such incompatible version of regex.h is part of the
+GnuWin32 Regex package.
+
+The solution is to remove the incompatible regex.h from the include
+path, when compiling Emacs. Alternatively, re-run the configure.bat
+script with the "-isystem C:/GnuWin32/include" switch (adapt for your
+system's place where you keep the GnuWin32 include files) -- this will
+cause the compiler to search headers in the directories specified by
+the Emacs Makefile _before_ it looks in the GnuWin32 include
+directories.
*** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
HCoop / bpt / emacs.git / blobdiff