Re: Emacs exited with message “X protocol error: BadPixmap”

[Kim F. Storm]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     I'm not going to run every program on my system under the debugger
>     forevermore on the off chance that the program might crash!
>
> Why not?  Do you feel it would be unethical?

I mostly run emacs under a debugger - but not every time, as
it is not always practical to do so.

E.g. when emacs is started through a desktop shortcut or launced by
some other program (like through the emacs.bash script distributed
with Emacs), there's no debugger involved ... and sometimes I just
continue working in such an Emacs instance ... without the debugger
in place.

Anyways, I've seen on Windoze that if Emacs crashes, Visual Studio
kicks in and offers you to debug the crashed process.

Can't Emacs be taught to do something similar by hooking various
signal handlers (SIGSEGV, SIGILL, etc) to a function that launches GDB
with command line parameters that attaches it to the (crashed) Emacs
runtime?  That way, GDB is only started _if_ Emacs crashes.

This could be a configuration option `debug-on-crash' with these values:

- nil, meaning don't debug, just dump core and crash
- t, meaning launch gdb unconditionally
- ask, meaining ask user to launch gdb or dump core

-- 
Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk