Subject: Re: bug#79280: package installation leaks tar-mode data buffers

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:02:58 +0300

> Cc: [email-masked]
> From: Mattias Engdegård <[email-masked]>
> Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 13:52:20 +0200
> 
> A more principled solution might be to make buffers GC-able like any other object, at least optionally. Exactly how to do this can be discussed but maybe just being able to remove a buffer from Vbuffer_alist would do. (We have one buffer like that, Vprin1_to_string.) Of course, we'd have to teach the GC to destroy buffers. Fkill_buffer is depressingly long and complicated and should be broken up in smaller parts.

There's no way Emacs could know whether a buffer is still needed.
Users that want to get rid of buffers that were not accessed for too
long can use the midnight.el features to do that.  So I don't think we
need to add any automation here.