emacs22 hangs when saving if backup file cannot be written

[Joe Harrington]

Binary package hint: emacs22

22.1-0ubuntu4~feisty1

To reproduce:

in a directory owned by root, as root:

touch foo
chown someuser.somegroup foo

as someuser:
emacs foo
    make some changes
    C-x C-s

hangs. Under emacs21, it would tell you it couldn't write the backup file and would write one named %backup% in your homedir. It should at least not hang.

--jh--

[Daniel Bengtsson (danielb-opera)]

I can't see this problem. I get the message as in emacs 21 and no hang. I am using 22.1-0ubuntu4.

[Joe Harrington (joeharr)]

Hm. Well, I could reproduce it reliably when I filed it, but now I can't; it's working as before for me, too. There were some updates in the last few days, but I think only with emacs21. If someone else sees it, reopen this. I'm marking as invalid.

--jh--

[Joe Harrington (joeharr)]

Nope, it's back. Sometimes this happens and sometimes not. When it happens, the hang is indefinite but interruptible with C-g. Write-file gives the same problem. In a session when it happens, it always happens. Changing the permissions of the directory to that of the user owning the file allows for the save. I do sometimes see the message about saving to the homedir.

--jh--

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10 beta or later?

[Joe Harrington (joeharr)]

Sorry, I'm in a production 8.04 environment, so I can't test in later versions. In emacs-22.1-0ubuntu10.1 the one time I tried it, it did not occur. I don't know what the condition was that sometimes triggered it in prior versions, so I can't know whether it is fixed or not.

--jh--

[Dimitrios Symeonidis (azimout)]

Any news on this?

(BTW, are we going to upgrade to 23.1 for Karmic?)

[rusivi2 (rusivi2-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. I noticed that the package version your bugging is updated in Lucid. As well, to avoid the production environment problem you could use virtualbox and try to re-engineer the circumstances under which this happen. Please update via http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ repost a detailed error report, and update the bug status. Thanks!

[Joe Harrington (joeharr)]

I'm now on 9.04 and I don't see the problem. But, it's not writing backup files, neither ~/%backup% nor foo~ files, when the file being edited is in a directory where the user does not have write permission.

GNU Emacs 22.2.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.16.1) of 2010-03-26 on yellow, modified by Ubuntu

I don't know how ideal this situation is, but it's not hanging anymore, and I cannot demonstrate that the behavior is not as documented. So I'm closing this bug.

--jh--