Subject: bug#6637: 24.0.50; kill ring being seriously polluted

From: David De La Harpe Golden <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2010 18:53:06 +0100

On 17/07/10 16:32, Tim Van Holder wrote:

> The following is something I do a lot as part of code editing:
>   1) copy/kill something
>   2) yank the copied/kill text
>   3) select certain portions and replace them as needed for that copy
>   4) go back to step 2) if needed
> The new behaviour interferes with this (and I don't see how it can do
> anything but interfere when pc-selection-mode is active).
>

Firstly (and this may be premature to mention (sorry) given there are 
more known unresolved issues) but N.B. there have been some even more 
recent changes addressing some problems with the recent changes, please 
try starting from emacs -Q with an emacs trunk build >= rev. 100838 and 
see if the problems you are having persist.   Unfortunately, there are 
known issues even in that revision, but they will (probably) be more 
subtle. There is effort ongoing to address them.

But as Chong just said, that's too vague to reproduce an issue from.

I do realise it's a drag to write concrete steps out in the detail 
really required - but it's pretty necessary for adequate repeatability, 
in this area small details matter.

Ideally (and I acknowledge it is time consuming), you would start from 
emacs -Q with a known test string (say the initial ";; This buffer is 
for..." or "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."), and describe 
the keystrokes and mouse clicks and point and mouse movements right down 
to which letters the point and mouse are on, the results of the 
operations, and the results you expected if they vary.

It is also possible there are Cygwin/X specific issues that you are 
seeing but the rest of us on other X servers aren't.  Eyeing its 
changelog (I personally don't have access to a windows box to test on), 
it likely has somewhat hairy handling of integration with the w32 
clipboard.  OTOH, said handling appears to be expecting now-conventional 
X11 app selection interaction behaviour, so making emacs adopt that 
behaviour by default shouldn't cause any gross problems (though will 
inevitably be somewhat different to emacs' historical default behaviour).