Subject: Re: bug#18438: 24.4.50; assertion failed in bidi.c

From: Ken Brown <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 09:18:14 -0400

On 9/11/2014 12:31 AM, [email-masked] wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Sep 2014 22:09:08 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>
>> Please run Emacs under GDB, and when this happens again, produce a
>> full backtrace and post it here.  I'd like to see if the symptoms are
>> similar to what Ken reported in bug #17817.
>
> I am unable to do this because Emacs hangs when run under GDB on opening
> a symbolic link.  Emacs hangs with a message in the minibuffer
> indicating that it is loading a library that is on my load-path as a
> symbolic link; if I replace this symlink with a copy of the file it
> links to, Emacs hangs on loading the next library that is installed via
> a symlink.  If there are no symlinks on load-path, it hangs where it
> would normally load my desktop file, which has files open via symlinks
> (i.e. there is a symlink to a directory in their path).  If I run `gdb
> emacs`, gdb gives "Error creating process /usr/local/bin/emacs, (error
> 5)." when I type the `run` command, but it can run emacs if I specify
> the name of the binary to which `emacs` is a symlink
> (/usr/local/bin/emacs -> /usr/local/bin/emacs-24.4.50.exe).  I am
> running GDB 7.8 from the Cygwin package.
>
> I'm surprised Ken did not run into this.  Ken, which version of Cygwin
> and GDB were you running at the time?

I was running whatever was current at the time.  But there is a bug in 
GDB 7.8 that prevents you from using it to debug a GUI version of emacs. 
  See https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17247#c34.  Until 
this is fixed, you need to downgrade to the previous release of GDB.

Ken