Subject: bug#7723: Process list gone wild

From: Lennart Borgman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2010 18:42:49 +0100

On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> From: Lennart Borgman <[email-masked]>
>> Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2010 16:29:31 +0100
>> Cc: [email-masked]
>>
>> As I have said before: all calls to the system must be carefully checked.
>
> A call to Finsert is not a system call.  And there's nothing
> system-call'ish in the fact that a value that was supposed to be a
> Lisp string is instead a list of strings.  I would rather suspect some
> rare condition in the code that doesn't get handled correctly.

No, of course not. But the fact is that I have only seen this problem
when system resources left are low. That is why I suspect some system
call mixing things up.

>From your comment I think you believe that this could happen anywhere
in Emacs, though it is rare. It could be true. I think I have filed a
bug report about blinking cursor that perhaps might be related. For
some reason I do not understand the cursor sometimes starts to blink
very fast.

That problem is reproducible.

>> > If you can reproduce this, put a breakpoint inside list_processes_1,
>> > and see which of the calls to Finsert signals the error and why.
>>
>> It is not reproducible, of course.
>
> Well, then how about running Emacs under a debugger, and when that
> happens again, looking around for the information I requested?

I will try to, thanks.