Re: POP Rmail in Emacs

Re: POP Rmail in Emacs

[Angelo Graziosi]

Ken Brown wrote:

> And I think Angelo has built CVS versions of emacs 23 with it

Yes, I confirm. I build Emacs-23 weekly.

In the last year many things have changed, and in better.

Now it bootstraps in less than 20 minutes (before, more than an hour).
Also, some strange bootstrap failure (which were solved simply changing
directory) has disappeared.

The build with GCC 4 series (before with my own build of gcc 4, now with
cygwin gcc4) is very stable.

Sincerely, the only crash I see is with tar files [1], but, in these
days, I am using Emacs 23 intensively with TeXLive and AUCTeX, so it is
possible (and surely) I do not see other bugs.

...and, last but not least, yes we need a Cygwin Emacs maintainer: I
would just curious to know why I have to start my GTK build of Emacs23 
with the annoying G_SLICE...

   $ G_SLICE=always-malloc emacs &

...and yes, a maintainer would simplify our life of Emacs users,
non-experts.

Cheers,
   Angelo

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[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-06/msg00839.html

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Re: POP Rmail in Emacs [Attn: Emacs maintainer]

[Ken Brown]

On 12/19/2008 4:38 PM, Angelo Graziosi wrote:
> ...and, last but not least, yes we need a Cygwin Emacs maintainer:

There *is* an official emacs maintainer, Steffen Sledz, but there's no 
indication that he monitors this list for emacs questions/problems.  The 
last message I saw from him was to the cygwin-apps list in October [1], 
concerning an rsync problem he was having when trying to build emacs for 
cygwin 1.7.  There was a reply to him on the main cygwin list [2], but 
he may not have seen it.  I'm not sure how to get his attention.

Ken

[1] http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-apps/2008-10/msg00075.html
[2] http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2008-10/msg00524.html

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Re: POP Rmail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 22:38:25 +0100
> From: Angelo Graziosi <angelo dot graziosi at alice dot it>
> 
> Ken Brown wrote:
> 
> > And I think Angelo has built CVS versions of emacs 23 with it
> 
> Yes, I confirm. I build Emacs-23 weekly.
> 
> In the last year many things have changed, and in better.
> 
> Now it bootstraps in less than 20 minutes (before, more than an hour).
> Also, some strange bootstrap failure (which were solved simply changing
> directory) has disappeared.
> 
> The build with GCC 4 series (before with my own build of gcc 4, now with
> cygwin gcc4) is very stable.

What is the status of building with GCC 3.x?  Does it still crash?

Anyway, like I said: feel free to submit (to emacs-devel@gnu.org) a
patch for etc/PROBLEMS that expresses the known problems with Cygwin
in a more up-to-date fashion.

> ...and, last but not least, yes we need a Cygwin Emacs maintainer: I
> would just curious to know why I have to start my GTK build of Emacs23 
> with the annoying G_SLICE...
> 
>    $ G_SLICE=always-malloc emacs &

This should also be in PROBLEMS, IMO.

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Re: POP Rmail in Emacs [Attn: Emacs maintainer]

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:38:36 -0500
> From: Ken Brown <kbrown at cornell dot edu>
> 
> On 12/19/2008 4:38 PM, Angelo Graziosi wrote:
> > ...and, last but not least, yes we need a Cygwin Emacs maintainer:
> 
> There *is* an official emacs maintainer, Steffen Sledz

Let me rephrase: we need a more active maintainer of the Cygwin Emacs.

As a matter of fact, reports of Cygwin-related problems on the Emacs
development and bug-reporting lists don't get any responses from
Steffen Sledz.  Searching the emacs-devel and bug-gnu-emacs archives
for his name yields zero hits.

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Emacs maintainer [was Re: POP Rmail in Emacs]

[Steffen Sledz]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Let me rephrase: we need a more active maintainer of the Cygwin Emacs.
> 
> As a matter of fact, reports of Cygwin-related problems on the Emacs
> development and bug-reporting lists don't get any responses from
> Steffen Sledz.  Searching the emacs-devel and bug-gnu-emacs archives
> for his name yields zero hits.

I'm really sorry for my low activity.

I'm a bit depressed because of my unsuccessful fighting with the build system (see some other threads in cygwin-apps). This detained (and detains) me from working on the emacs problems. But i hope there will come better times.

Also my try to take over maintainership for emacs was made out of necessity because no one else was willing to do this. And i don't want to see emacs vanish from cygwin. May be the task is a bit to big for me. So if there is somebody else interested in taking over the maintainership or to share it with me, you're welcome.

Steffen


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Re: POP Rmail in Emacs

[Ken Brown]

On 12/19/2008 11:19 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Yes, Angelo deserves a lot of kudos for his efforts, but unfortunately
> much more is needed.  For example, even though it is possible to build
> a Cygwin version now, if you are willing to install specific versions
> of development tools, the following entry from etc/PROBLEMS in the
> Emacs distribution would not sound very good to me if I were a Cygwin
> user who needs to decide whether to install Emacs:
> 
>   *** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC versions
> 
>   Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
>   reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time.  In
>   addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
>   info.  Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
>   compiling Emacs.  GCC versions 4.0.3, 4.0.4, 4.1.1, and 4.1.2
>   reportedly build a working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend
>   these GCC versions.  Note that these versions of GCC, 4.0.3, 4.0.4,
>   4.1.1, and 4.1.2, are currently the _only_ versions known to succeed
>   in building Emacs (as of v22.1).
> 
> Feel free to update this entry for recent versions of GCC, but
> personally I would stay away of a package that has problems with so
> many versions of the compiler.

The entry in etc/PROBLEMS is out of date and was probably written before 
there was an official gcc4 cygwin package.  You no longer have to 
install special versions of gcc.  If you simply install cygwin's current 
gcc4 package, you get gcc 4.3.2, with which it's easy to build emacs 
22.3.  (And I think Angelo has built CVS versions of emacs 23 with it.) 
  I've been using my build of emacs 22.3 daily for several months with 
no problems under cygwin 1.5.

Ken

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Re: POP Rmail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:21:06 -0500
> From: Ken Brown <kbrown at cornell dot edu>
> CC: eliz at gnu dot org
> 
> On 12/19/2008 3:27 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > I guess this is an ample opportunity to call for volunteers to come on
> > board and help maintaining the Cygwin build of Emacs.  As of now, the
> > Cygwin build has some known ``stability issues'' (read: it sometimes
> > crashes during the build or in routine operation), and there's no one
> > on the Emacs development team who has enough knowledge and/or time to
> > fix these Cygwin-specific problems.
> 
> For the record, let me point out that it's been possible for several 
> months to build a stable emacs for cygwin using gcc-4.  This was first 
> announced on this list by Angelo Graziosi [1].

Yes, Angelo deserves a lot of kudos for his efforts, but unfortunately
much more is needed.  For example, even though it is possible to build
a Cygwin version now, if you are willing to install specific versions
of development tools, the following entry from etc/PROBLEMS in the
Emacs distribution would not sound very good to me if I were a Cygwin
user who needs to decide whether to install Emacs:

  *** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC versions

  Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
  reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time.  In
  addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
  info.  Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
  compiling Emacs.  GCC versions 4.0.3, 4.0.4, 4.1.1, and 4.1.2
  reportedly build a working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend
  these GCC versions.  Note that these versions of GCC, 4.0.3, 4.0.4,
  4.1.1, and 4.1.2, are currently the _only_ versions known to succeed
  in building Emacs (as of v22.1).

Feel free to update this entry for recent versions of GCC, but
personally I would stay away of a package that has problems with so
many versions of the compiler.

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Re: POP Rmail in Emacs

[Ken Brown]

On 12/19/2008 3:27 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I guess this is an ample opportunity to call for volunteers to come on
> board and help maintaining the Cygwin build of Emacs.  As of now, the
> Cygwin build has some known ``stability issues'' (read: it sometimes
> crashes during the build or in routine operation), and there's no one
> on the Emacs development team who has enough knowledge and/or time to
> fix these Cygwin-specific problems.

For the record, let me point out that it's been possible for several 
months to build a stable emacs for cygwin using gcc-4.  This was first 
announced on this list by Angelo Graziosi [1].  He sent me the 
instructions, and I had no problem replicating the build.  (I'm not sure 
why the emacs maintainer hasn't done this, but maybe the issue is that 
cygwin's gcc-4 is still considered experimental and not suitable for 
official cygwin packages.)

That's the good news.  The bad news is that some work still needs to be 
done to make emacs usable under the soon-to-be-released cygwin 1.7 [2,3].

Ken

[1] http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2008-09/msg00330.html
[2] http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2008-12/msg00329.html
[3] http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2008-12/msg00153.html

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Re: POP Rmail in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: gustav <gustav@indiana.edu>
> Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:50:53 -0500 (EST)
> 
> 
> If you still use Emacs' original Rmail with POP under Cygwin, you may
> have noticed that it doesn't work. The reason is that Rmail tries to
> create a file with a ":" in its name, which Cygwin can't do. A simple
> remedy is to edit rmail.el as follows:
> 
> *** /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp/mail/rmail.el    Fri Feb 22 05:51:38 2002
> --- rmail.el    Thu Dec 11 21:26:14 2008
> ***************
> *** 1502,1508 ****
>              (if rmail-pop-password-required
>                  (progn (setq got-password (not (rmail-have-password)))
>                         (setq password (rmail-get-pop-password))))
> !            (if (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
>                  ;; cannot have "po:" in file name
>                  (setq tofile
>                        (expand-file-name
> --- 1502,1508 ----
>              (if rmail-pop-password-required
>                  (progn (setq got-password (not (rmail-have-password)))
>                         (setq password (rmail-get-pop-password))))
> !            (if (or (eq system-type 'windows-nt) (eq system-type 'cygwin))
>                  ;; cannot have "po:" in file name
>                  (setq tofile
>                        (expand-file-name

Emacs 22.1 (released in June 2007) and later already includes this
fix.

I guess this is an ample opportunity to call for volunteers to come on
board and help maintaining the Cygwin build of Emacs.  As of now, the
Cygwin build has some known ``stability issues'' (read: it sometimes
crashes during the build or in routine operation), and there's no one
on the Emacs development team who has enough knowledge and/or time to
fix these Cygwin-specific problems.  If things are left in their
current shape, the upcoming Emacs 23, a major new release with much
better Unicode support and other important new features, such as
multi-tty, will be released without any systematic Cygwin support,
which in practice means it will probably not work too well.

If you feel like volunteering, please write to emacs-devel@gnu.org.


P.S.  It is much more Lisp'y and slightly more efficient to say

  (if (memq system-type '(windows-nt cygwin))

than to say

  (if (or (eq system-type 'windows-nt) (eq system-type 'cygwin))

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POP Rmail in Emacs

[gustav]

If you still use Emacs' original Rmail with POP under Cygwin, you may
have noticed that it doesn't work. The reason is that Rmail tries to
create a file with a ":" in its name, which Cygwin can't do. A simple
remedy is to edit rmail.el as follows:

*** /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp/mail/rmail.el    Fri Feb 22 05:51:38 2002
--- rmail.el    Thu Dec 11 21:26:14 2008
***************
*** 1502,1508 ****
             (if rmail-pop-password-required
                 (progn (setq got-password (not (rmail-have-password)))
                        (setq password (rmail-get-pop-password))))
!            (if (eq system-type 'windows-nt)
                 ;; cannot have "po:" in file name
                 (setq tofile
                       (expand-file-name
--- 1502,1508 ----
             (if rmail-pop-password-required
                 (progn (setq got-password (not (rmail-have-password)))
                        (setq password (rmail-get-pop-password))))
!            (if (or (eq system-type 'windows-nt) (eq system-type 'cygwin))
                 ;; cannot have "po:" in file name
                 (setq tofile
                       (expand-file-name


It's best not to touch the original rmail.el, because when you
upgrade, and the file gets overwritten, you'll end up with the same
problem again. Instead, copy rmail.el to your private site-lisp
directory, edit as above, byte-compile, then cons the directory onto
the load-path in the .emacs file.

Happy hacking,

==
 Zdzislaw (Gustav) Meglicki, Office of the Vice President for Information
 Technology, Indiana University, 601 E. Kirkwood Ave., Room 116, 
 Bloomington, IN 47405-1223, USA, http://perth.ovpit.indiana.edu/gustav,
 Ph: 812-856-5597 (o), 812-345-3284 (m), Fax: 812-855-3310/812-856-3147,
==
 Messenger: zdzisiekm@hotmail.com
 Yahoo:     zdzisiekm@sbcglobal.net
 Skype:     zdzislaw.meglicki


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