Emacs 'zone', should NOT be enabled by default.

[Tim Jones]

Binary package hint: emacs21-common

Zone uses a lot of CPU when it activates. I think it should not be active by default.
I often leave emacs open on my home machine, which also hosts a few apache servers. Having to disabled things like this should not have to be done, they should be optional extras to enable if you want them. This one, zone, in particular is odd as it seems to try and be a screensaver for an individual app (emacs), and not the monitor. If all applications did the same, imagine what would happen!

Sorry, this got to me a little, and really really irritated me, probably a little more than necessary :(

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Apr 2 14:42:48 2007
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04
Uname: Linux dog 2.6.20-13-generic #2 SMP Sun Mar 25 00:21:25 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

As far as I can tell, it's not enabled by default (I have to type "M-x zone" to enable it). Could you please attach your ~/.emacs file? Please also include what version of the emacs21 package you are using.

[Tim Jones (tim-mr-dog)]

Hi, just had time to check. The culprit was the emacs-extra package turn on zone mode. Just a little unexpected. I've removed my emacs-extra package now. It's not a 'ubuntu supported' package so I guess it's not too important!

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

Closing out per reporter's comments. Thank you for your help!

[sportiel (a-sportiello)]

Sorry, but I have to confirm the "bug".

"...the emacs-extra package turn on zone mode..." (not emacs-common itself) : true.

but uninstalling emacs-extra is NOT a solution! emacs-extra is otherwise full of good things, as one can read from the many features enabled by
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/emacs-extra/emacs-extra.el

and, no, turning zone on is not done in the user's .emacs file, which is almost empty after install, but in the system customizations, more precisely in the file above. Actually, references to "zone" customizations, after removing the unrelated "time-zone" things, are disseminated everywhere!
(do grep "zone" /usr/share/emacs*/*/*/*.el | grep -v "time" to see this...)

To conclude, that's the lines
--------
(when (>= emacs-major-version 21)
[...]
  (require 'zone)
  (setq zone-idle 300)
  (zone-when-idle 300))
--------
in /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/emacs-extra/emacs-extra.el
which cause the automatic loading of zone. One needs to cut them out at every reinstallation.
I confirm that I needed to do it just today, after a fresh Ubuntu dist-upgrade (to emacs22)
No telling, in a poll if one should remove these lines in the 'standard' emacs-extra.el file, I vote 'yes', for the reasons very well described by Tim Jones in his posts, and because zone is just not useful.

PS: I suspect a bug in zone itself. It looks like, if zone is up and running while the system is awake, it takes small resources, but if it is working while screensaver is on, then it takes much more resources... I don't know, but it looks like zone relyes on the pauses for drawing to screen, and, if not occurring because of screensaver, it takes much more cpu.

[randomubuntuguy (john4lists)]

ditto sportiel's remarks about that garbled text screen saver (zone) thing not working properly in ubuntu karmic. It appears to slow down my computer.

[era (era)]

It is arguably a bug in emacs-extra that it enables zone by default. Luckily, emacs-extra is going away (for reasons pretty much like this one; see bug #336210) but the remaining bug, in zone itself, should probably be fixed as well.

[Thomas Hotz (thotz-deactivatedaccount)]

Is this still an issue for you? What Ubuntu version do you use? Thank you for telling us!

[Tim Jones (tim-mr-dog)]

Hi Tom,

I've switched to Linux Mint Debian now due to Ubuntus switch to Gnome 3, so
this is a non-issue for me now.

Thanks,
Tim

On 3 December 2012 11:25, Thomas Hotz <email address hidden> wrote:

> Is this still an issue for you? What Ubuntu version do you use? Thank
> you for telling us!
>
> ** Changed in: emacs-extra (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Incomplete
>
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> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/101905
>
> Title:
> Emacs 'zone', should NOT be enabled by default.
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