🚀 go-pugleaf

What I have to report is more of a mis-feature than and out-and-out bug, but I
thought it worthwhile to report anyway. I'll also admit that I have not gone
through the sources on this, so my diagnosis may not be quite correct, but I
assure you that the problem is real.

First, the setup. I run GNU Emacs 18.55.1 on Ultrix workstations (VAXStation
2000, VAXStation 3500, DECStation 3100). All of my group's systems "cross
mount" their file systems via NFS, in the following way. On each system there
is a directory /usrs, and each filesystem, including local ones, has a
standard name in that directory. For example, the system called takahe (if
you're wondering about the name, our naming scheme is flightless birds) has
two file systems called "takahe" (its /usr file system) and "takahe1" (a
second drive).

Second, the symptoms. This morning, one of the systems (ostrich) was down.
When trying to run emacs on either takahe (VAXStation 3500) or ibis
(DECStation 3100), it would hang before doing anything to the screen, and I
would get "NFS server ostrich not responding". Lest you think that I have an
inadvertant reference in my .emacs to some file on ostrich, on another machine
(adelie (a kind of penguin)), emacs would come up just fine (only a bit slow,
since adelie is a VAXStation 2000).

Now the diagnosis. The order of the entries in each machine's /usrs directory
is different (these directories are per-machine; though they all have the same
names entered into them, which of those names are local and which are NFS
mount points is different for each machine). Now to find things on my emacs
path for loading at start up, emacs tries to find /usrs/takahe. On takahe and
ibis, "ostrich" occurs *before* "takahe" in the /usrs directory, whereas on
adelie "ostrich" occurs *after* "takahe".

Now my guess is that in searching for a file, emacs is doing its own directory
search, and it is doing something like calling stat on the entries in the
order in which they occur in the directory. If my guess is right, I'd like to
make a plea that emacs *not* look up individual names this way (clearly it's
necessary in dired). There are ways for us to get around this (by putting the
actual NFS mount points one level deeper in the directory hierarchy), and we
will pursue them (if only to make csh not hang because of its directory
hashing), but I still feel that emacs should not work this way.
--

		J. Eliot B. Moss, Assistant Professor
		Department of Computer and Information Science
		Lederle Graduate Research Center
		University of Massachusetts
		Amherst, MA  01003
		(413) 545-4206; Moss@cs.umass.edu