bug#3751: 23.0.95; C-h H does not display hourglass cursor

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>
> Cc: 3751@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2019 07:01:23 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > On MS Windows, "C-h H" takes as much as 10 seconds (on a 3GHz
> > machine), but no hourglass cursor is displayed during that time,
> > making it look like nothing is going on.
> >
> > If displaying an hourglass cursor during the time Emacs prepares to
> > display etc/HELLO is difficult, at the very least please display some
> > informative message that ends with "please wait..." in the echo area.
> 
> Hi Eli,
> 
> Here is another bug of yours that was reported 10 years ago.  Is this
> still an issue?  It seems to me that it would be easy to add a message
> using progress-reporter.

It is still an issue, and the reason is the details of how the
hourglass cursor display is implemented on MS-Windows.

I'd like this bug report to be left open, because it is an example of
quite a few other situations where a prolonged operation doesn't cause
the hourglass cursor to be displayed.  I still hope that someone will
add or modify the code to produce the expected effect in those cases.

If someone wants to work on this, I can provide more details.

Thanks.