Re: gnus makes emacs lose response

[Gregory Novak <novak@ucolick.org>]

Ralf Angeli <angeli@iwi.uni-sb.de> writes:
> After some messing around I found the difference between between both
> cases.  Under Windows the process (e.g. openssl s_client) dies as soon
> as the modem connection is closed while on GNU/Linux it is kept alive.
> That means after reconnecting to the internet under Windows a new
> process is started which has no problem communicating to the server
> while on GNU/Linux the old one is reused which obviously cannot cope
> with the new internet connection.

I just wanted to add a bit of my own experience to this.  I use Gnus
to read mail under Emacs 21.4 and My IMAP server seems to be fond of
closing the connection after a relatively short period of inactivity.
This leads to the behavior noted -- Gnus seems to hang but C-g works.
I usually deal with this by quitting and restarting Gnus one or two
times, or else searching for the gnutls process and killing it from
the command line.  Perhaps there could be a short timeout (like 10
seconds) after which Emacs asks "The connection looks like it might be
dead--kill it and start a new one? (y/n)"

Most of my Emacs work is done using a recent CVS build of the Carbon
port.  I used to read mail with Gnus using this copy of Emacs, but I
_have_ experienced hangs that are unbreakable with C-g.  This was
sufficiently annoying that I just run the 21.4 version of Emacs for
mail and nothing else.  Under 21.4, I've never experienced an
unbreakable hang in Gnus.

All of this is on OS X 10.4 using the Fink build of Emacs 21.4 and
some (more or less randomly updated) Carbon build of Emacs from CVS.

Greg