Re: Need help debugging Emacs: emacsclient will not draw its contents sometimes

[Mike Kupfer]

After several months of not seeing this problem (last discussed in
September), I hit it today after invoking "emacsclient -c".  I've
attached a partial screenshot.  The background color looks right, and I
see the region for the menubar, but the gutters, scrollbar, and modeline
are all totally missing.

Here's the relevant excerpt from the server log for two emacsclient
invocations.  The first one is for the bad frame, the second one is for
a working frame.  I can provide the entire server log if desired.

Mon Feb 15 10:47:31 2016 server <10>: Status changed to open: open from -
Mon Feb 15 10:47:31 2016 server <10>: server-delete-client
Mon Feb 15 10:47:31 2016 server <10>: Received -env _=[...]
Mon Feb 15 10:47:31 2016 server <10>: Sent -emacs-pid 1622
Mon Feb 15 10:47:31 2016 server <10>: #<frame address@hidden 0x4343058> created
Mon Feb 15 10:50:52 2016 server <11>: Status changed to open: open from -
Mon Feb 15 10:50:52 2016 server <11>: server-delete-client
Mon Feb 15 10:50:52 2016 server <11>: Received -env _=[...]
Mon Feb 15 10:50:52 2016 server <11>: Sent -emacs-pid 1622
Mon Feb 15 10:50:52 2016 server <11>: #<frame address@hidden 0x4eba368> created

(The environment has some values that I'd rather not post on a public
list, so I've elided the environment from the above excerpt.  The only
environment difference between the 2 frames was some sort of tag that
dmenu creates, e.g.,
DESKTOP_STARTUP_ID=i3/dmenu_run/5146-9-athyra_TIME3863103774.)

Some things that I noticed that looked interesting:

1. #<frame address@hidden 0x4343058> (the bad frame) refers to an address
that matches a frame that was closed back on Friday.

Fri Feb 12 15:58:27 2016 server <3>: server-handle-delete-frame, frame #<frame 
Todo.krb5-issues 0x4343058>
Fri Feb 12 15:58:27 2016 server <3>: server-delete-client noframe
Fri Feb 12 15:58:27 2016 server <3>: Status changed to closed: deleted
Fri Feb 12 15:58:27 2016 server <3>: server-delete-client
Fri Feb 12 15:58:27 2016 server <3>: Deleted

2. The bad frame does not appear in the results from frame-list:

  (frame-list)
  (#<frame address@hidden 0x4eba368> #<frame journal-2016.org 0x3073760> 
#<frame *GNU Emacs* 0x1128268>)

3. Doing an strace of Emacs showed zero activity when I moved the mouse
over the bad frame or when I clicked in it.

Also, I'll note that gdb shows the emacsclient process trying to read
from the socket.  AFAICT there is nothing unusual there.

This was with Emacs 24.5.  I plan to install 25.0.91 on the affected
system tomorrow, but who knows how long it will take for the problem to
reproduce.

mike

Screenshot from 2016-02-15 10-48-39.png
Description: top of bad frame