Re: Dealing with hanging IMAP connections

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> On my notebook, which is connected via WLAN, my IMAP connection hangs
>> from time to time. When this happens, I completely have to restart Gnus,
>> which I find pretty annoying. Stefan Monnier posted a patch to
>> emacs-help which will open a new connection when you interrupt the
>> current IMAP operation with C-g. I've applied this patch to my
>> installation and find it very useful. I think this or something similar
>> should be applied to imap.el, preferably as a customizable option?

> Usually Stefan has a reason not to install a patch upstream, e.g. if
> he knows about problems with the patch or if he thinks the solution
> isn't clean.  Stefan?  (--> Cc-ed).

Well, the reason is that I don't know that it's the right solution.
It feels like a workaround more than anything.  If the problem is in
gnutls or openssl, then it's maybe OK to have a workaround, but
otherwise we'd want a real fix.

But even if a workaround is OK, I'm not sure this one is the right one.
I just don't understand enough of Gnus's convention for how to handle
connection deaths, timeouts, and automatic reconnects to know where it
should be handled.

>> Here's the link to Stefan's post:
>> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.help/69934
> [ What's all this report-emacs-bug/backtrace output about? ]

IIRC it's a backtrace that shows a call to accept-process-output with
inhibit-quit bound to t, i.e. a call that could freeze Emacs hard.
That's why the patch includes a with-local-quit.


        Stefan