bug#11822: 24.1; emacsclient terminal mode captures escape characters as text

[Stefan Monnier]

>> >> But I know of no way to do just the pattern matching and
>> >> existence test without fetching all the other data. The amount of wasted
>> >> allocations are dependent on the content of my directory, of course.
>> > Did you look at that directory lately?  It should be cleaned from time
>> > to time, to avoid having there auto-save files from years ago.
>> Arguable, Emacs should fins a way to do it automatically for you.
> Do what? clean up that directory?  That's not the issue here.

Indirectly it is one of the issues.  Regardless of this consing problem,
having too many of those files accumulate is just not a good idea, and
asking the user to do it manually is OK but not ideal.

We can solve the consing problem some other way, but solving this
problem would also help solve the consing problem.

> The issue is that startup.el wants to know whether there are _any_
> auto-save files, so that it could suggest recover-session.

Yet we don't do this computation merely at startup, but every time we
refresh the menu (i.e. very often).
So another way to attack the problem is to avoid recomputing it all
the time.


        Stefan