Spinning in _XReply

[Jeremy Huddleston]

On Feb 21, 2011, at 19:03, Pat Kane wrote:

>  On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 7:51 PM, Jeremy Huddleston <jeremyhu at apple.com> wrote:
>> So... what should we do about this?
> 
> A good first step would be to try come up with a small-ish test case,
> or to at least
> figure out how to reproduce the problem on another system.   I use
> EMACS on my RHEL6
> and Ubuntu 10.10 systems a lot, and have not see the problem.  What is IDL?

IDL is a data visualization package used a lot by astrophysicists (http://www.ittvis.com/ProductServices/IDL.aspx)

> The only Mac that I have access to is a Mac Mini that I bought for my
> lovely wife
> two years ago, but she does not really like me getting too near to it.

Well it has nothing to do with Mac.  It's a re-entrancy issue with _XReply.

> A work-around would be to increment a static count in the code that is looping
> and break out, with an ugly warning message when the count gets too high.
> But then your users might complain about some other thing being borked...

That's not exactly elegant.  My original question was never really answered.  Should we actualy support calling _XReply from an error handler?  If not, then this seems like an issue for third parties to fix (although it does raise binary compatibility concerns)