Subject: bug#17688: 24.3.90; segmentation fault in deselect_palette

From: Zdzislaw Meglicki <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 11:58:00 -0400

> But you did say you get the same backtrace involving
   > deselect_palette twice.

Yes, twice the same crash, separated by a day or so.

   > Did it happen during copying and pasting between Emacs and Firefox
   > both times?  Maybe you could experiment with that and see if you
   > can find a reliable way to produce the crash.

You see, I copy and paste... er... all the time (call it "creative
cheating"...) I maintain a data base, on another machine, it's really a
Plone-4.2 instance, into which I paste articles collected from browsing
the web. Eventually, this ends up begin a copy from emacs and a paste
into Firefox. I do it all the time and it works without a glitch
*almost* all the time. The crashes are sporadic, which is why it's so
hard to diagnose the problem.

I did suspect the clock, also I did suspect mail lookup. I use rmail to
read mail, which is placed in the local spooler by fetchmail, which gets
it from Google. Sometimes, I saw crashes, just while editing text in
emacs, no external copy/paste, perhaps other than meta-w, ctrl-y (it
still goes through Windows, in emacs-w32, mind you, because it can be
pasted onto other docs). What if there is some racing condition on
looking up the mail spool file, racing between fetchmail and emacs'
rmail, that crashes emacs?

I'll try the .emacs simplifications suggested.

Incidentally, rmail, there's another bug there, that showed up only in
the latest version of emacs, the one I got from you, 24.3.90.1. When I
am in the rmail-summary and try to get out of it by typing "q", I get a
message that the pointer does not point to the right window. Something
gets screwed up there.  It worked in the earlier versions.

Cheers,
Gustav

-- 
Zdzislaw (Gustav) Meglicki, Office of the Vice President for
Information Technology, Indiana University, 2709 E. 10th Street,
Bloomington, IN 47408, USA, http://perth.ovpit.indiana.edu/gustav,
Ph: 812-856-5597 (o), 812-345-3284 (m), Skype: zdzislaw.meglicki