Return to BSD News archive
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!uunet!walter!qualcom.qualcomm.com!unix.ka9q.ampr.org!karn From: karn@unix.ka9q.ampr.org (Phil Karn) Subject: More problems with GNU Emacs 19.16 Message-ID: <1993Jul23.082249.26633@qualcomm.com> Sender: news@qualcomm.com Nntp-Posting-Host: unix.ka9q.ampr.org Reply-To: karn@servo.qualcomm.com Organization: Qualcomm, Inc Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1993 08:22:49 GMT Lines: 37 Thanks to Nate Williams and Sean Fagan for pointers on fixing the copy-on-write problems I have been seeing with Gnu Emacs 19.16. I've run into another more serious problem. When I'm in Mail composing a message and I enter "~v" to drop into a visual editor (I have "VISUAL=emacs" in my environment) all works well as long as I have DISPLAY set so that emacs uses the X windows server. However, if DISPLAY is not set (e.g., I'm logged in via a pty), emacs will immediately stop (ps status "T", trace stop) before displaying anything. "kill -CONT" is ignored. However, emacs 19.16 works just fine if I invoke it directly from the login shell, even when DISPLAY is not set (termcap to the pty works fine.) This problem did not appear until I installed version 19.16 of GNU Emacs. I had been running version 18.something which worked fine. I've isolated the problem somewhat, although I've not been able to fix it yet. Emacs is stopping due to SIGTTOU or SIGTTIN signals (background write/reads attempted to/from control tty). I suspect the problem is caused by Mail unmasking all signals before it spawns off the editor, and emacs doesn't catch or ignore them. I did try modifying emacs to ignore these two signals. This caused emacs to at least get as far as displaying some output (which hadn't happened before) but then it wouldn't respond to the keyboard. It seemed to be looping, consuming CPU time. Before I dig further into this, has anyone else encountered the same problem and hopefully fixed it? At this point I'm not sure who is at fault, Mail for not setting the signal actions properly before execing emacs, or emacs for not catching them. I'd like to fix the right program. Phil