bug#24531: bug#6149: bug#24531: process-send-string seems to truncate lines over 4096 characters

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: 24531@debbugs.gnu.org, 6149@debbugs.gnu.org, jidanni@jidanni.org
> Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2023 17:21:53 -0400
> From:  Stefan Monnier via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs,
>  the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>
> 
> > I see that this bug is about 13 years old.  I think there's a pretty
> > obvious solution: process-connection-type should default to nil.
> 
> In practice, that can't fly because it'll break existing code.

Indeed.  A large portion (I think the majority, but I'm not sure) of
Lisp programs that use bidirectional communications with async
subprocesses actually _want_ the PTY interface, because they act as
GUI front-ends to other programs.  Think "M-x term", "M-x gdb",
inferior-python-mode, etc.  Even "M-x grep" and the likes need that
because they rely on default color output, which only happens if Grep
is connected to a terminal device.  Some of the Emacs features based
on this don't work or don't work well on MS-Windows because Windows
only supports pipes.  Do we really want such semi-broken behavior on
GNU and Unix systems?

The number of applications that (a) don't need console-like behavior
and (b) need to send larger-than-4KB buffers to sub-processes is quite
small.  Which is why this issue comes up only very rarely.  So making
pipes the default will fix a very small fraction of applications, and
break the vast majority -- clearly a wrong balance.

> Also I don't think either value of `process-connection-type` is a good
> option.  IOW, I think that the connection type should be a mandatory
> argument when creating an async process (except maybe for those
> processes with no input/output).

If we go that way, we should start by specifying :connection-type for
all the uses of make-process and start-process we have in the core.
It's a large job, but before it is done we cannot in good faith make
such an incompatible transition.

> So maybe, the default value of `process-connection-type` should be
> `unspecified` and the process creation code should emit a warning when
> creating a process whose connection type is `unspecified` (just
> a warning, tho: it should then pursue execution as if that value was t,
> as usual, so as to preserve compatibility).

Something like that, yes.

But I'm actually wondering how come modern Linux kernels don't have a
way of lifting this restriction, or at least enlarging the limit so it
makes the problem even less frequent.  Is there some inherent
limitation that this must be 4KB and nothing larger?