From: Spencer Baugh <sbaugh@janestreet.com>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Cc: luangruo@yahoo.com, 63865@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#63865: 29.0.90; call-process while owning the X selection hangs other processes
Date: Sat, 03 Jun 2023 09:10:02 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <ieredmsadzp.fsf@janestreet.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <83mt1g9044.fsf@gnu.org> (Eli Zaretskii's message of "Sat, 03 Jun 2023 15:55:07 +0300")
Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> If I'm implementing some package and I decide to use call-process for
>> some long operation, then some user uses my package and it runs
>> call-process, and they get bored while waiting and switch away from
>> Emacs, they'll experience a hang in some other application. That hang
>> seems clearly undesirable!
>
> Then don't design the package such that call-process blocks Emacs for
> prolonged periods of time. Because this will annoy the users of Emacs
> even before it will be seen by other applications that request X
> selections.
Forget other packages: Emacs itself uses call-process in tons of places
where it will run for prolonged periods of time!
In fact, I just ran "C-x p g call-process" to search for instances, only
to find that that command itself uses call-process and hung my other
applications!
Should we port all these instances away from using call-process to avoid
this behavior? I certainly would like to, because I don't like that
when I do a particularly long process-find-regexp or shell-command or
any other operation which uses call-process, it doesn't just hang Emacs,
it hangs basically my whole OS.
>> I'm personally working around this by replacing call-process with
>> start-process and accept-process-output. Because otherwise my packages
>> (and any other package using call-process ever) will cause random hangs
>> in other applications, which is obviously bad and not something anyone
>> would want.
>>
>> So perhaps call-process on Unix should be reimplemented in terms of
>> those functions? Or if that would change behavior too much, perhaps
>> call-process should be deprecated in favor of some new helper built on
>> those?
>
> call-process has its use cases, which are important, and we will not
> deprecate it.
>
> You can easily emulate call-process with start-process if you need to
> do so, so Emacs gives you both possibilities (and expects you to use
> whatever is right in each case).
What use case does call-process have on Unix, which an emulation in
terms of start-process would not also satisfy?
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-06-03 13:10 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 26+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-06-03 1:55 bug#63865: 29.0.90; call-process while owning the X selection hangs other processes Spencer Baugh
2023-06-03 6:02 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-06-03 7:11 ` Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors
2023-06-03 9:12 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-06-03 9:31 ` Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors
2023-06-03 11:10 ` Spencer Baugh
2023-06-03 11:16 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-06-03 12:07 ` Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors
2023-06-03 12:30 ` Spencer Baugh
2023-06-03 12:55 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-06-03 13:10 ` Spencer Baugh [this message]
2023-06-03 13:48 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-06-03 14:12 ` Spencer Baugh
2023-06-03 14:24 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-06-03 14:41 ` Spencer Baugh
2023-06-03 15:02 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-06-03 15:34 ` Spencer Baugh
2023-06-03 15:50 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-06-04 0:18 ` Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors
2023-06-03 16:21 ` Andreas Schwab
2023-06-03 17:03 ` Spencer Baugh
2023-06-03 17:07 ` Eli Zaretskii
2023-06-04 0:15 ` Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors
2023-06-04 0:13 ` Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors
2023-06-04 0:12 ` Po Lu via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors
2023-06-23 14:26 ` Spencer Baugh
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