Re: master 5c532fe303: Recommend that the user turn off memory overcommit

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Brian Cully <bjc@spork.org>
> Date: Fri, 08 Apr 2022 09:42:44 -0400
> Cc: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
>       Your proposal

It isn't his proposal, it is my proposal.

> crosses a line into how people should administer
> their systems even when Emacs functions as expected within the context
> of that system. ie, if I’m on Linux, overcommit is standard and I
> presumably know how to deal with it or am ignorant of it. In either
> event it is not the place of my text editor to tell me that memory
> overcommit is bad. There are countless opinion pieces on the web that
> will do that job just fine, should I seek them out.

The proposal is to explain how overcommit affects Emacs's handling of
out-of-memory situation, and how to avoid that if desired.  It is up
to each user to decide whether they do or don't want to do that.  our
users are grown-ups, or at least we should treat them as such, so they
should be perfectly capable of making this decision.

Whatever you think about the "usual" practice of over-committing, it
basically disables a very important feature of Emacs, which is
described in the user manual, so there's nothing wrong with explaining
to the users why that happens and how to control this OS behavior.