Re: Fiddling with the menus

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: CHENG Gao <chenggao@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:51:27 +0800
> 
> I think "Emacs Known Problems" should only show outstanding problems in
> CURRENT emacs.

Would you like to volunteer to maintain etc/PROBLEMS along these
lines?  Mind you, the task is not as easy as it maybe sounds, because
knowing just which problems are solved and which are not is quite
hard, especially if the problem is about an OS you don't use and don't
have access to.

Let's take a random entry:

    ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.

    This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size.  You can
    prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
    to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.

How to know if this still happens? the entry doesn't even say on which
system it was spotted.

> And some problems are caused by third party packages (for example VM).
> It could be put into another file.

I don't think this is a good idea.  Someone looking for his/her
problem shouldn't need to scan numerous files.

> My understand is "Emacs Known Problems" is for problems related to
> current Emacs and its bundled packages.

Yes, but Emacs could have problems caused by third-party packages as
well.  We don't want to omit the information about that, if it can
help.  For example:

    *** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
    appear on disk.

    This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
    remote disk is full.  It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
    implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
    detect the problem.  Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
    calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
    where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.

Sounds useful, doesn't it?