bug#17686: 24.3; fetching mail in gnus -vs- erc

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com> writes:

> I somewhat regularly experience an unfortunate interaction between gnus
> and erc.
>
> I use fetchmail to download mail to my machine.  Then I tell gnus to
> pull this into nnmail groups.
>
> I also use ERC.
>
> If I have a lot of email (thousands of messages) pending, and then start
> ERC and only after that start gnus, then the ERC connection will time
> out while gnus processes the mail.  This logs me out of the irc server.
>
> I don't see why this has to happen.  Perhaps gnus and/or emacs could
> ensure that the ERC process gets called while importing the email.

Emacs Lisp is (basically) single-threaded, and Gnus fetches mail
synchronously, so all other Lisp stuff has to wait until the synchronous
action is over.  Including the ERC stuff, which is presumably running
off of a process filter.

I don't think there's any way to fix this without rewriting Emacs Lisp
to be multithreaded, and then this would like, just work, or rewrite
Gnus to do its fetching stuff asynchronously, and that's probably not
going to happen.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no