This file describes various problems that have been encounteredin compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.* `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFSfile system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page anddoes not get a response from the server within a timeout whose defaultvalue is just ten seconds.If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.* `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up informationin the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by usingexpand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not workin the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or inanything it loads. Yuck - some solution.I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what isgoing on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is includedin the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.* On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solvesthe problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; besure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.* Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.* Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even thoughthe names work properly with other programs on the same system.This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use sharedlibraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of theshared library which uses a name server--but has not installed asimilar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work withthe nameserver, but Emacs does not.The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what youinstalled in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.* On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld: /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.* Self documentation messages are garbled.This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspondwith the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing thecorresponding pair of files should fix the problem.* Trouble using ptys on AIX.People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.* Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries toexecute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places, but tty is giving it back 3.The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a singleword: if (`tty` == "/dev/console") should be changed to:if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console") Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrcand into .login.* Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.* Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.* `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) inyour .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH inthe environment.* Emacs starts in a directory other than the one that is current in the shell.If the PWD environment variable exists, Emacs uses this variable asthe initial working directory.Some shells automatically update this variable, while other shells failto do so. If you use two such shells in combination, the variable canend up wrong. This confuses Emacs.The solution is to put something in the start-up file for the shellthat does not update PWD, to get rid of that environment variable.For example, in csh, use `unsetenv PWD'.* Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicatesthat you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries, with a floating point option other than the default.It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes incrt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the defaultfloating point option: -fsoft.* Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rdarguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h totell Emacs to compensate for this.I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itselfwhether this problem is present on a given system.* Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver as a concentrator.This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.* M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunosversion 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine. * Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs' terminal type.The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAPenvironment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable toprovide the information on the special terminal type that Emacsemulates.Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAPin such a case. You could use the following conditional which setsit only if it is undefined. if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-fileOr you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should nothappen in a non-login shell.* X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacsnot to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. Butthe problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I thinkthe bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so thatyou are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.The easy way to do this is to put (setq x-sigio-bug t)in your site-init.el file.* Problem with remote X server on Suns.On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on anothermay not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. Thisis because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.* Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment varsThese control the actions of Emacs.~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function"load" will search.If you observe strange problems, check for these and get ridof them, then try again.* Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo DomainYou may find that M-x shell prints the following message: Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.Here is how to make more of them. % cd /dev % ls pty* # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7) % /etc/crpty 8 # creates eight new pty's* Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dumpThis command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by theMakefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swappingspace available on the machine.On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in thesubroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, evenfor large blocks (many pages).* test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered* or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"* or, temacs runs and dumps xemacs, but xemacs totally fails to work.* or, temacs gets errors dumping xemacsThis can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not befooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these arebinary files and can contain all 256 byte values.In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" ina binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characterswhen unpacking the shell archive.I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not knowwhat transfer means caused this problem. Various networkfile transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in itsnonprinting characters, you can fix them: 1) Record the names of all the .elc files. 2) Delete all the .elc files. 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large. You might as well save the old alloc.o. 4) Remake xemacs. It should work now. 5) Running xemacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist. You may need to increase the value of the variable max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report. 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any) and remake temacs. 7) Remake xemacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.* temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .elfiles during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up morespace than was allocated.This could be caused by 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files. Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard; if you have received Emacs from some other site and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider deleting that file. 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files (not from the directory you expected). 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist. This would cause the source files (.el files) to be loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose. 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates the space required.If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definitionof PURESIZE in puresize.h.But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequenceof something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the realproblem.* Changes made to .el files do not take effect.You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changeswill not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directoryand specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is olderthan the corresponding .el file.* The dumped Emacs (xemacs) crashes when run, trying to write pure data.Two causes have been seen for such problems.1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is definedas a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correctvalue in the man page for a.out (5).2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among theinitialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in mostof its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static andnot initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems youmay need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.* Compilation errors on VMS.You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there arevariable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.This is not an error. Ignore it.VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this constructwere removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend charactersin conditional expressions. The bug is: char c = -1, d = 1; int i; i = d ? c : d;The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in theconditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of suchconstructs in Emacs have been fixed.* rmail gets error getting new mailrmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a programcalled `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail usingthe protocol defined by /bin/mail.There are two different protocols in general use. One of them usesthe `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to dothis. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOURSYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictionsprevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as`mail'. You can use these commands (as root): chgrp mail movemail chmod 2755 movemail* Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.* GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.Some people have found that Emacs was unable to connect to the localhost by name, as in DISPLAY=prep:0 if you are running on prep, butcould handle DISPLAY=unix:0. Here is what tale@rpi.edu said: Seems as though gethostbyname was bombing somewhere along the way. Well, we had just upgrade from SunOS 3.5 (which X11 was built under) to SunOS 4.0.1. Any new X applications which tried to be built with the pre OS-upgrade libraries had the same problems which Emacs was having. Missing /etc/resolv.conf for a little while (when one of the libraries was built?) also might have had a hand in it. The result of all of this (with some speculation) was that we rebuilt X and then rebuilt Emacs with the new libraries. Works as it should now. Hoorah.If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way todo this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINEor LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macrothat is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,be careful not to lose the others.Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolvThen if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see thatthe s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.hagain to say this:#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar* Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.This means that Control-S/Control-Q "flow control" is being used.C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes awayC-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long streamsof text without user commands, there is no need for a user-issuable"stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a properly designedflow control mechanism would transmit all possible input characterswithout interference. Designing such a mechanism is easy, for a personwith at least half a brain.There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place: 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsibleFirst of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controlswhether they generate flow control characters. This must beset to "no flow control" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimesthere is an escape sequence that the computer can send to turnflow control off and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' stringshould turn flow control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find itneeds more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlledby the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baudrate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will printyour output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it ifit is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. Ifthe results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably aproblem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizardto fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes justgiving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow controlcodes. You might as well try it.If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computerthrough a concentrator which sends flow control to the computer, or itinsists on sending flow control itself no matter how much padding yougive it. You are screwed! You should replace the terminal orconcentrator with a properly designed one. In the mean time,some drastic measures can make Emacs semi-work.One drastic measure to ignore C-s and C-q, while sending enoughpadding that the terminal will not really lose any output. To makesuch an adjustment, you need only invoke the functionenable-flow-control-on with a list of terminal types in your own.emacs file. As arguments, give it the names of one or more terminaltypes you use which require flow control adjustments.Here's an example:(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")An even more drastic measure is to make Emacs use flow control.To do this, evaluate the Lisp expression (set-input-mode nil t).Emacs will then interpret C-s and C-q as flow control commands. (Moreprecisely, it will allow the kernel to do so as it usually does.) Youwill lose the ability to use them for Emacs commands. Also, as aconsequence of using CBREAK mode, the terminal's Meta-key, if any,will not work, and C-g will be liable to cause a loss of output whichwill produce garbage on the screen. (These problems apply to 4.2BSD;they may not happen in 4.3 or VMS, and I don't know what would happenin sysV.) You can use keyboard-translate-table, as shown above,to map two other input characters (such as C-^ and C-\) into C-s andC-q, so that you can still search and quote.I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set forthe assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. Thisflow control technique is a bad design, and terminals that needit are bad merchandise and should not be purchased. If you canget some use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, I am glad,but I will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systemsfor the sake of inferior systems.* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flowcontrol despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps yourterminal is connected to the computer through a concentratorthat wants to use flow control.You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work withoutflow control, as described in the preceding section.If that line of approach is not successful, map some other charactersinto C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example aboveshows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flowcontrol characters to the remote system to which they connect.On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flowcontrol on the local system.One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using thestty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,"stty start u stop u" will do this.Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One wayaround this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, andissue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.* Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for thatterminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handingthe combination of features specified for that terminal.The first step in tracking this down is to record what charactersEmacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write allterminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then dowhat makes the screen update wrong, and look at the fileand decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.There are several possibilities:1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely youneed more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way by termcap.This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way forEmacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behaviorand other terminals that behave subtly differently but areclassified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm forEmacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must betested on many kinds of terminals.3) The termcap entry is wrong.See the file etc/TERMS for information on changesthat are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entriesfor certain terminals.4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixedin termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.* Output from Control-V is slow.On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use failsto inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screenbefore a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top afterthe Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,it will scroll them to the top of the screen.If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason isthat the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does notspecify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacsconcludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes tosend the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You mustfix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as muchtime as the operations really take.Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send charactersat a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for theterminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminalsoperated across networks, often the network provides some sort offlow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slowan operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you wantEmacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This willcause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they donot really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrollingis happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deletingmultiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in thetermcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will havefast output without wasted padding characters. These strings shouldeach contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of linesto be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap`cm' string.You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminalhas a command to insert or delete multiple characters. Thesetake the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amountof motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.* Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines: *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f) aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).* You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappearafter a day or two.The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused bythe fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type anothercharacter) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletionof text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure tooverprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conformingto it.For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousandother control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;but there are not very many other control characters, and I thinkthat providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is moreimportant than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file: (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)You may then wish to put the function help-command on someother key. I leave to you the task of deciding which key.* Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug thatcauses it. There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system call in the RFS server. The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files to make sure that the bits are on the disk. This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server. The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem. (as always, your line numbers may vary) % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v retrieving revision 1.2 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987 *************** *** 163,169 **** /* * No return sent for close or fsync! */ ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync) proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]); else { --- 166,172 ---- /* * No return sent for close or fsync! */ ! if (syscall == RSYS_close) proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]); else {* Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs: foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccomThese are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same constructmay compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, dependingon what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changesin header files that should not affect the file being compiledcan affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes filesthat compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affectyou. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but morecan always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if itshould happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to anarray of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call: Lisp_Object *args; ... ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in Lisp_Object *args; Lisp_Object tem; ... tem = args[i]; ... foo (r, tem, ...)...causes the problem to go away.The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.* 68000 C compiler problemsVarious 68000 compilers have different problems.These are some that have been observed.** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not workif x is of type Lisp_Object.** "cannot reclaim" error.This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correctline number in the error message. The code must be rewritten withsimpler expressions.** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };lose (arg) struct foo arg;{ test ((int *) arg.y);}If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your typeof machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.* C compilers lose on returning unionsI hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which isdefined as a union on some rare architectures.This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your typeof machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.