Re: Fatal error (11). Emacs/ Linux hosed my very long document.

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"wlcna" <wlcna@nospam.com> writes:

> "Mike Cox" <mikecoxlinux@yahoo.com> wrote in message 
> news:3d6111f1.0409161437.30ef8b7d@posting.google.com...
>>I recently switched to xemacs as my default word processor so I could
>> do formatting in TEX for a very long document.  Most recently I've
> [...]
>
> I don't really care about this discussion because I don't like/can't stand 
> emacs (I use vi and vim) and also initially thought the o.p. was a complete 
> liar and troll, but having looked at his other posts and his posting 
> history, I no longer believe this and moreover...  I NOW THINK this guy has 
> a point:  xemacs is a pile of crap if this guy was editing for five hours 
> and it crashed out of nowhere on him.
>
> I think xemacs has a problem here because I've NEVER ONCE
> experienced a crash with vim, whether it be using it from the
> command line or gui.  Not once, and it's the only editor I've been
> using for years, and I don't use it in any plain, stripped down
> versions, but pretty well feature-maxed versions, under multiple
> operating systems and windowing environments.  This guy was editing
> for five hours and he gets a crash "out of nowhere."

Well, according to "this guy", he had been writing a review, and had
written 100 pages at the time of the crash.  A 100 page review, and
written at a speed of 20 pages per hour.

And then, while he is writing with this fervor, XEmacs crashes, of all
things, in the package finder.  What is he doing browsing the package
finder in the middle of such a heated editing session?  And then he
gets a traceback which indicates no crucial function at all, like what
would happened if you did a kill -SEGV explicitly on XEmacs.

And lo and behold, the autosave file is missing.  It is one of the
most foolproof systems ever, and it is purportedly not doing anything.
I have done editing with completely unstable development versions of
Emacs, and never lost more than about a line of text when it crashed.

And then we have Mike Cox, a _known_ anti-Linux troll from
comp.os.linux.advocacy, and he crossposts his report without much
usable information (and the given information rather unbelievable) to
a bunch of groups including advocacy groups.

No really, your vim preferral in all respect, but I am afraid that
_this_ posting is nothing to feed it.

> One can call him an idiot for not saving, but his whole intent was
> to USE Linux tools to REVIEW them.  This makes sense.  And putting
> himself in the risky situation he put himself in makes a bit of
> sense also.  He got burned, his review will now reflect that, people
> will learn from his getting burned.  He will not gloss over this
> fact.

Hard to gloss over anything if you write 100-page reviews.

> I also just read the xemacs/lemacs versus emacs/RMS stuff on jwz.org
> and I must say this jwz person sounds like a prize putz, as well as
> the Richard Gabriel person and all of those Lucid people.  I find it
> hard to believe that there were people defending this obviously
> MERCENARY, SELF-PROMOTING, SHALLOW bunch within that discussion.

They had a business to run that needed to be profitable.  I'd not call
that "mercenary".  "Mercenary" means making _other_ people's business
your own in exchange for money.

> While I don't like emacs, I would completely take his side in that
> discussion.

Emacs will be pleased to hear that.  But since you are 10 years late,
it will not interest many others.

> I would think the o.p. might try regular emacs and report his
> experiences there, since the problem could simply be with the
> non-standard, separately maintained version he chose to use, xemacs,
> which may simply be a crash-prone pile of crap compared to regular
> emacs.

Nice piece of flame-bait here.  Thankfully, you are not representative
for the typical vim user.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum