[no subject]

[Gerald R. Barber <JERRYB at MIT-AI>]

cc: BUG-LISPM at MIT-AI

    Date: 14 October 1980 16:11-EDT
    From: Mike McMahon <MMcM at MIT-AI>
    Sender: MMcM at CADR6 at MIT-AI
    To:   JERRYB
    cc:   BUG-LISPM

        Date: 14 OCT 1980 1106-EDT
        From: JerryB at MIT-AI (Gerald R. Barber)

          5.  It won't save the mail file it has gobbled.  The scenario that led to problem 2
        was that it read in all my mail, including my babyl file, deleted my mail file and rewrote
        my babyl file with only its old contents.  So now it has all my mail in its guts and
        any attempts to save the mail result in a "no changes have been made" message which
        isn't the case.
    I find that very difficult to believe.  In particular you have the order of events wrong: your
    new mail file is not deleted until AFTER the updated BABYL file has been rewritten.  Can you
    please describe the circumstances better?  It should have renamed your MAIL file to _ZMAIL,
    which would be left around if it crashed before finishing.
Some things that might be relevant that I discovered since I sent my message:
Yes it did rename my mail file and all but the background zmail process was
the one that got the "trying to read on a closed channel" error.  It was
trying to read _ZMAIL and was about half way through when the error occured.

          3.  There is a particular message in my mail--which I can't get to because of the lost 
        mail--that causes the computation of the summary line to bomb out with wrong args to =.
    From inside what function?
        
I am not really sure but I think it was in a some function like COMPUTE-SUMMARY-LINE.

          4.  Past a particular point in the mail file any attempts to continue cause LOCK to
        appear in the wholine and reseting the process in the only way out.
    Can you please be more specific?
As it turned out this was as far as the background process got.  It seemed to
be waiting on it.

My current babyl file, JERRYB;JERRYB BABYL, causes zmail to die, it reads in
about 75% of it and quits with NIL in the wholine.  

As far as I know I am not using anything fancy.