Subject: RE: bug#13968: 24.3.50; emacs_backtrace.txt

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:34:09 -0700

> > Useless without a recipe.
> 
> Forgot to show where it aborts:
> 
> 	  form.rcArea.bottom = (WINDOW_BOTTOM_EDGE_Y (w)
> 				- WINDOW_MODE_LINE_HEIGHT (w));
> 
> It's an assertion violation, but the report doesn't even say what was
> the text of the assertion message.  The above 2 macros could abort in
> XFRAME, XWINDOW, or XBUFFER.

Yes, well there never is a recipe for this kind of thing (but thanks for taking
a look)...  The crashes I get seem to happen any old time, and each time I send
in emacs_backtrace.txt you say it is useless (and I believe you).

And I've gotten plenty of crashes, seemingly ever since Emacs Dev starting
adding more assertions here and there to the C code.

What's the point of adding such assertions and providing backtraces that are
apparently useless?  That doesn't seem to have accomplished much that is
constructive, but it does seem to have increased the number of crashes (just a
guess).

Anyway, multiple reports of crashes (by me and others) have not prevented Emacs
24.2 or 24.3 from being released.  FWIW, before Emacs 24 I rarely had an Emacs
crash.

The C code seems to be a bit flaky now.  There seems to be a lot of C
development since Emacs 24.1, and perhaps there is not as much in the way of
fixing problems that get introduced along the way.  Not an informed judgment,
just one, naive impression.

I'm not faulting you, Eli, and I do appreciate your taking a look at the bug
reports.  Just mentioning that in my naive view, Emacs seems less stable than
before, on the C side.

Presumably such assertions are turned off when Emacs is released (?), so
releases should crash less, at least.  I tend to use trunk builds, so perhaps I
underestimate the release stability in this regard.

As you hint above, perhaps the assertions can be refined, so the backtraces
produced become more informative.  I will continue to report them, unless you
say it's not worth the trouble in general.