bug#13086: 24.2.50; Emacs seems to hang at w32proc.c:1126

[Paul Eggert]

On 12/06/12 10:28, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Yes, but we usually do that only if Emacs cannot possibly recover from
> that internal error.  If Emacs _can_ continue, then we only abort via
> eassert, so that a production version won't crash.

Well, it depends on what "recovery" means.  In this case, if
Emacs ignores the error and continues, it will have a confused
data structure that can cause it to kill unrelated innocent-victim
processes seemingly at random.  Such a bug would be rare and hard to
track down -- I would not be surprised if users have run across
this bug in the wild but have not known that Emacs was the culprit
and have assumed it was a Heisenbug in the innocent-victim program.

One possibility is for Emacs to fall back into recovery mode, such
as what it does now when it runs out of memory.  That is, Emacs
would tell you that it has had an internal error and that you should
save your work and exit as soon as you can.  This would lessen
the likelihood of the confused Emacs causing further damage.