Re: Debugger entered--Lisp error: (overflow-error "13419098521433281274")

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

Hi Ted,

> TH> Here's the offending code:
> TH> 	  (while (re-search-forward "^\\* [0-9]+ FETCH " start t)
> TH> 	    (setq elems (read (current-buffer)))
> TH> 	    (push (cons (cadr (memq 'UID elems))
> TH> 			(cadr (memq 'FLAGS elems)))
> TH> 		  articles))
>
> TH> Of course, it is convenient to `read' the complete list in lines like
>
> TH>   * 2971 FETCH (FLAGS (%Recent) UID 12509 MODSEQ (13419098521433281274))
>
> TH> but it fails for large numbers.  And if the RFC says those are 64bit
> TH> unsigned ints, well, then Gnus has to handle those.
>
> Gnus has no way to do it when Emacs can't.  The calc package has some
> facilities for big numbers but yeah, (read) will not DTRT with input
> like that.  I've asked for it on emacs-devel.
>
> To fix it now, I would replace such large numbers with a truncated
> version, which can be done safely with a regex before the reader sees
> the input.  But I'll let Lars decide, he knows that code best.

But that huge number is not used by gnus, anyway.  It is `read' but only
the UID and FLAGS values are saved.  So IMHO, the proper fix is to put a
condition-case around the `read' that picks the UID and FLAGS with
string-matching if an overflow-error occurs.

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
Sent from my Emacs