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

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2025 22:47:31 -0400

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To have buffers that can be GC'd if not really in use could be useful.
But I think it will be much more convenient to code which uses that
feature if they have names to refer to them by.

Such a buffer could be in the buffer list as usual, but some flag in
the buffer would say that the buffer list should not protect it from
GC.  It would be protected if anything else pointed to it, except
a marker pointing in it I suppose

At the end of GC, if a buffer is not marked to be preserved,
GC could kill it in the usual way.  It could look at all the
buffers in the buffer list to find those it wants to kill.

Because the buffer does have a name, displaying it or selecting it
would be easy.  You could do that with the usual functions and
commands.  Doing so would protect it from GC, for the time.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)