Re: autosave

[Peter Blicher <blicher@research.nj.nec.com>]

   Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2002 09:19:03 -0600 (MDT)
   X-Authentication-Warning: aztec.santafe.edu: rms set sender to rms@aztec using -f
   From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
   cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
   Reply-to: rms@gnu.org
   Content-Length: 516

       When unable to create (or write to?) some autosave dir .emacs.d or below,
       retries forever.  This occurred when I was running with a home dir that I
       couldn't write to (because I was root on a different machine).  Never had
       this problem in versions 20.4 and before.

   Would you please supply a precise test case so we can reproduce this?
   Please read the Bugs section in the Emacs manual, which provides
   guidelines on how to write a bug report to give us the
   necessary information so we can fix the bug.

Oh, I guess I should mention a couple of other things:

1.  I changed the permissions on the .emacs.d dir to be rwx everyone, and
    that fixed the problem.  (Thus lending credence to my theory that it
    can't figure out that it can't write and/or read that dir.

2.  I think I recall that in the past, when emacs could not for some reason
    write an autosave file, it would simply issue a message to that effect
    and go on, rather than get into an infinite loop of trying to access the
    autosave directory.  If I'm not mistaken, the autosave files used to be
    written to the home dir; now apparently there is a new separate dir
    created in the home dir for that purpose.  While this leaves less of a
    mess in the home dir, it makes me think it is highly likely that someone
    cleaned up some code a little too much.

3.  Since I have like 20 years of historic emacs lisp code I am loading some
    of, which generally has to be trimmed at each new major release, it is
    true that this problem could somehow be my fault.  Alas, I don't have
    time right now to check that.

4.  Though I don't have time to do this myself right now, what I would
    suggest to try to reproduce this bug is this: Run with a home dir that
    contains an .emacs.d directory that you do not have any of rwx on.  Put
    emacs into a state where it wants to autosave something.  See what
    happens.  If you don't have a problem, email me and say you can't do
    anything until I give you better info.  Else, fix the bug.

--peter

-- 
A. Peter Blicher        NEC Research Institute
609-951-2716            4 Independence Way
609-951-2488 fax        Princeton, NJ  08540-6634  USA
blicher@research.nj.nec.com