Known Problems with GNU Emacs
-Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
- 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010
+Copyright (C) 1987-1989, 1993-1999, 2001-2011
Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end of the file for license conditions.
The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
present in load-path:
- emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
+ emacs -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
CFLAGS="-g -O2 -fno-optimize-sibling-calls" ./configure
+** Emacs compiled with GCC 4.6.1 crashes on MS-Windows when C-g is pressed
+
+This is known to happen when Emacs is compiled with MinGW GCC 4.6.1
+with the -O2 option (which is the default in the Windows build). The
+reason is a bug in MinGW GCC 4.6.1; to work around, either add the
+`-fno-omit-frame-pointer' switch to GCC or compile without
+optimizations (`--no-opt' switch to the configure.bat script).
+
** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
-** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes when closing a display (x-close-connection).
+** When Emacs is compiled with Gtk+, closing a display kills Emacs.
-This happens because of bugs in Gtk+. Gtk+ 2.10 seems to be OK. See bug
-http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
+There is a long-standing bug in GTK that prevents it from recovering
+from disconnects: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
-** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ may loop forever if a display crashes.
+Thus, for instance, when Emacs is run as a server on a text terminal,
+and an X frame is created, and the X server for that frame crashes or
+exits unexpectedly, Emacs must exit to prevent a GTK error that would
+result in an endless loop.
-This is related to the bug above. A scenario for this is when emacs is run
-as a server, and an X frame is created. If the X server for the frame
-crashes or exits unexpectedly and an attempt is made to create a new
-frame on another X display, then a Gtk+ error happens in the emacs
-server that results in an endless loop. This is not fixed in any known
-Gtk+ version (2.14.4 being current).
+If you need Emacs to be able to recover from closing displays, compile
+it with the Lucid toolkit instead of GTK.
* General runtime problems
** Miscellaneous problems
+*** Editing files with very long lines is slow.
+
+For example, simply moving through a file that contains hundreds of
+thousands of characters per line is slow, and consumes a lot of CPU.
+This is a known limitation of Emacs with no solution at this time.
+
*** Emacs uses 100% of CPU time
This is a known problem with some versions of the Semantic package.
This happens sometimes when using Metacity. Resizing Emacs or ALT-Tab:bing
makes the system unresponsive to the mouse or the keyboard. Killing Emacs
-or shifting out from X11 and back again usually cures it (i.e. Ctrl-Alt-F1
+or shifting out from X11 and back again usually cures it (i.e. Ctrl-Alt-F1
and then Alt-F7). A bug for it is here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/231034.
Note that a permanent fix seems to be to disable "assistive technologies".
2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the
following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only
- after the the initial frame is displayed:
+ after the initial frame is displayed:
(scroll-bar-mode -1)
(menu-bar-mode -1)
(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
"stty start u stop u" will do this. On some systems, use
-"stty -ixon" instead.
+"stty -ixon" instead.
Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
exec ssh "$@"
+*** GNU/Linux: Truncated svn annotate output with SSH.
+http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=7791
+
+The symptoms are: you are accessing a svn repository over SSH.
+You use vc-annotate on a large (several thousand line) file, and the
+result is truncated around the 1000 line mark. It works fine with
+other access methods (eg http), or from outside Emacs.
+
+This may be a similar libc/SSH issue to the one mentioned above for CVS.
+A similar workaround seems to be effective: create a script with the
+same contents as the one used above for CVS_RSH, and set the SVN_SSH
+environment variable to point to it.
+
*** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
As of Emacs 22.1, there have been stability problems with Cygwin
builds of Emacs using GCC 3. Cygwin users are advised to use GCC 4.
+*** Building Emacs 23.3 and later will fail under Cygwin 1.5.19
+
+This is a consequence of a change to src/dired.c on 2010-07-27. The
+issue is that Cygwin 1.5.19 did not have d_ino in 'struct dirent'.
+See
+
+ http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-07/msg01266.html
+
*** Building the native MS-Windows port fails due to unresolved externals
The linker error messages look like this:
2. Install the latest Windows SDK.
3. Replace emacs.ico with an older or edited icon.
+*** Building the MS-Windows port complains about unknown escape sequences.
+
+Errors and warnings can look like this:
+
+ w32.c:1959:27: error: \x used with no following hex digits
+ w32.c:1959:27: warning: unknown escape sequence '\i'
+
+This happens when paths using backslashes are passed to the compiler or
+linker (via -I and possibly other compiler flags); when these paths are
+included in source code, the backslashes are interpreted as escape sequences.
+See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-07/msg00995.html
+
+The fix is to use forward slashes in all paths passed to the compiler.
+
** Linking
*** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real problem.
-*** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
-
-The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
-C backtrace printed by GDB:
-
- 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
- (gdb) where
- #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
- #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
- #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
- #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
-
-This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
-of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
-but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
-other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
-distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
-GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
-following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
-distribution:
-
- #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
- even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
- know what's really going on here. */
- /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
- 0x10000000. */
- #if defined __linux__
- #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
- #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
- #endif
- #endif
- #endif /* 0 */
-
-Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
-the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
-should now succeed.
-
*** OpenBSD 4.0 macppc: Segfault during dumping.
The build aborts with signal 11 when the command `./temacs --batch
Two causes have been seen for such problems.
1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
-as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
+as a macro. If the definition (in both unex*.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
value in the man page for a.out (5).
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-arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a