Re: Question about pgtk -- is it meant to fix the disconnect crash bug?

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

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On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 10:38 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > From: chad <yandros@gmail.com>
> > Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2021 14:10:39 -0800
> > Cc: Yuuki Harano <masm+emacs@masm11.me>,
> >  EMACS development team <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> >
> >  I had thought that one of
> >  the benefits of the pgtk branch was that it would not have this bug,
> >  which plagues the old Emacs GTK builds.  Am I just making that up?
> >
> > Adding a bit of historical perspective: it might be more accurate to say
> "the GTK people are unwilling to
> > address the issue when it's caused by what some people call 'unclean gtk
> use' inside emacs", with the
> > concomitant hope that they will more more receptive to a pure-gtk issue.
>
> Isn't the pgtk branch supposed to produce a "clean GTK use" inside
> Emacs?  I thought that was its purpose.
>

As I understand it, yes. This has the potential upsides of better
integration and maybe a better fit for a theoretically post-X11 world.
Another hopeful upside it "fewer years of Martin's life lost to
frustration, etc". It might also help people find and solve the issue with
gtk/gdk opening/closing/reopening display connections, but that doesn't
seem certain to me: they asked for a simpler case than "all of emacs", and
I'm not sure that "a different emacs" will be sufficient. I base this
skepticism on the understanding that there is no doubt that the problem
exists or (roughly) where, but rather that it is worth the required effort
from the limited pool of people who are in position to do it.

I can't help but notice that Wayland offers a potential "solution" by
simply not supporting the underlying functionality that triggers the
problem. In terms of "kicking the can down the road", the basic Wayland
approach is "We're making something that you might use as a can. We do not
promise that 'kicking' will apply to it, and explicitly disclaim any
concept of 'road'." They're doing this to keep the problem more tractable;
the emacs/gtk bug is one example of the sort of thing that they're
explicitly labelling "Somebody Else's Problem".

Again, I hope this helps,
~Chad

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