tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (05/19/89)
Today while switching between one Emacs window and another (not inside
Emacs, but two seperate processes on my X display) there was a bit of
a delay in changing the input focus. I didn't notice and the net
effect was that the wrong Emacs got exited by C-x C-c.
Normally this isn't a problem because of the wonderfulness of
auto-save. Or if I had a shell running (for example) then Emacs would
have prompted me regarding whether it should kill the process and
exited.
It was a problem, however, because I had a network stream open. Emacs
sort of treats network-strems as only partially-pseudo-process-like;
half of the commands that apply to processes also work for
network-streams but other commands don't. Emacs also doesn't prompt
about whether to close the stream or not when exiting. The result of
that timing error on my part was that I left a stale connexion at the
remote service which had to be dealt with from that end. If this were
just a once-in-a-year occurence it would be fine, but sometime I exit
Emacs and forget that I suspended GNUS, or that I am connected to this
Network Server. (Just like when someone forgets that they have a
shell running.) I haven't yet learned the C aspect of programming for
Emacs so I can't really offer coded as a fix, but could something be
added for v19 in the #ifdef subrocesses (kill-emacs, emacs.c) to check
the state of any network streams and prompt about whether to kill them?
Dave
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