bug#13546: 24.2.92; Error(s) when sending emails

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I doubt anyone else who tracks development versions has such an

Just to comment that this is not really the development version any
more; this is essentially Emacs 24.3. If not many people are pretesting
it, there's not much we can do. Or if people are testing it, but not
seeing this, it's not common.

> extreme setup, that puts such a pressure on the infrastructure used in
> the w32 Emacs for supporting subprocesses and network connections (the
> same infrastructure is used for both types).  As you must have seen in
> one of the messages I posted and in the corresponding screencast, Helm
> sometimes fires up an async subprocess for every keystroke, then kills
> each one of them right away.

To me, this doesn't seem a very sensible thing to do, but I've never
used Helm.

> Emacs on Windows can only support up to 32 subprocess or up to 64
> network connections (each subprocess requires resources of 2
> connections). So any subtle problems and race conditions in the
> related code, that will go unnoticed on more "quiet" systems, could be
> exposed by such an enormous resource pressure. This is complicated by
> the fact that Sebastien uses the Cygwin Bash as the sub-shell, so any
> subtle problems with controlling, communicating, and killing such
> processes from a native w32 application might also come into play
> here.

I don't know how long we keep waiting for this issue, which is 5 weeks
old at the moment. Possibly/probably even older, eg

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2012-10/msg00021.html

http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=13701#11

http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=13701#14
   Problems began appearing with Emacs 24, IIRC.

Exactly the same issue in 24.1, AFAICS:
http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=12579#50

And in 24.2:
http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=12579#134

And in 24.2.50:
http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=12579#188

Report #12579 is 5 months old, and very long.


If we can't seem to make any progress in the next few days, I think all
we can do is add a PROBLEMS entry (which no-one will read of course),
and carry on with 24.3. But if people think that's a bad plan, we can
wait a bit more.