NFS write from emacs (on an SGI) to lispm hangs-up forever

[stephen@boeing.com (Stephen L Nicoud)]

I don't know if this is related, but we used to have problems with Sun
(Lucid) CL 3.0 renaming files on an NFS-mounted Symbolics disk.  After
iterating with Sun and Symbolics, we finally got a patch (#5379) from
Lucid through Sun for their CL.  The patch uses the rename system call
and it works fine. (this all happened in March of 1990).

Here's a description (provided from Symbolics) which describes what
was going wrong:

    According to our NFS's author, Lucid Common Lisp is using an obsolete idiom
    for renaming a file.  Here's his comments:

      Instead of using the rename system call, Lucid is renaming the file by
      creating a hard link to the file and then unlinking the old name of the
      file.  This practice was the standard way to rename a file before the
      renameUNIX system call was made, and still probably is the only way to
      rename a file on an implementation of UNIX that doesn't have a rename
      system call.

Perhaps Emacs is doing something similar and not using the rename
system call.

Stephen
--
Stephen L Nicoud  <stephen@boeing.com>  uw-beaver!bcsaic!stephen
Boeing Computer Services Research and Technology, Computer Science
Bellevue, Washington  USA
"I ask unananimous consent to revise and extend my remarks."