Subject: bug#38309: Recent $EMACSLOADPATH changes crash gnome-session

From: Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2019 02:40:51 +0900

Hello all,

Really sorry about this ugly regression :-/.

I'm surprised that a 22000 characters in an environment variable would
be an issue though, given that that's probably around 22 KiB of memory
and some people tested huge variables (>18 MiB) without facing any hard
limit other than RAM [0].

Which leads me to suspect that the problem might be Gnome specific?  I
haven't experienced it, but then my EMACSLOADPATH variable is only about
7000 characters and I'm not using Gnome (I use ratpoison as a WM).

If someone could confirm that they can login using another desktop
(XFCE, perhaps?) that'd tell us we need to look more carefully at what
gnome-session does and why it crashes on larger than average environment
variables.

I believe the "enhancement" #1 (to deprecate guix.d subdirectories) in
XFCE?) as explained in bug #38273 [1] could lead to a much leaner
EMACSLOADPATH, by reducing the number of entries necessary to refer to
all the Elisp packages.

[0]  https://aplawrence.com/Unixart/variable_limits.html
[1]  https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=38273#34

Maxim