10 New information about old XEmacsen

This is part 10 of the XEmacs Frequently Asked Questions list. It will occasionally be updated to reflect new information about versions which are no longer being revised by the XEmacs Project. The primary purpose is advice on compatibility of older XEmacsen with new packages and updated versions of packages, but bug fixes (which will not be applied to released XEmacsen, but users can apply themselves) are also accepted.

10.0: XEmacs 21.1

10.0: XEmacs 21.1

Q10.0.1: Gnus 5.10 won’t display smileys in XEmacs 21.1.

Eric Eide wrote:

Previously I wrote:

Eric> Summary: with Gnus 5.10.1 in XEmacs 21.1.14, I don’t see Eric> any smileys :-(.

After a bit of sleuthing, I discovered the essence of the problem. For me, the form:

(with-temp-buffer (insert-file-contents "foo.xpm") (buffer-string))

returns the empty string. This is because something somewhere replaces the XPM data with a glyph — I haven’t figured out where this occurs.

Kyle Jones replies:

Do this:

(setq format-alist nil)

The image-mode stuff is gone from format-alist in the 21.4 branch, praise be.

Q10.0.2: XEmacs won’t start on Windows in XEmacs 21.1.

XEmacs relies on a process called "dumping" to generate a working executable. Under MS-Windows this process effectively fixes the memory addresses of information in the executable. When XEmacs starts up it tries to reserve these memory addresses so that the dumping process can be reversed – putting the information back at the correct addresses. Unfortunately some .DLLs (for instance the soundblaster driver) occupy memory addresses that can conflict with those needed by the dumped XEmacs executable. In this instance XEmacs will fail to start without any explanation. Note that this is extremely machine specific.

21.1.10 includes a fix for this that makes more intelligent guesses about which memory addresses will be free, and this should cure the problem for most people. 21.4 implements "portable dumping", which eliminates the problem altogether. We recommend you use the 21.4 binaries, but you can use the 21.1 binaries if you are very paranoid about stability. See section Are binaries available?.

This document was generated by Aidan Kehoe on December 27, 2016 using texi2html 1.82.