Spacemacs freezes on startup when running in GUI on FreeBSD

[cubranic]

Running the PC-BSD distribution of FreeBSD (v10.2), when I start Spacemacs GUI (emacs from xterm), it seems to get stuck part way through the startup. The window does not refresh, but when I press C-g in Spacemacs, it displays the message "waiting for process to die... (type C-g to kill it instantly)"; pressing C-g again gets the UI to respond again, but the initialization doesn't seem to be complete, as many key bindings (e.g., SPC f f) aren't recognized. Most visibly, neither helm nor which-key seem to be active.

Spacemacs config is just a fresh checkout from github, no customization of my own. It happens with both the full and minimal installation.

This does not happen when running a text UI (emacs -nw), or daemonized Emacs with GUI emacsclient frames.

In top, when Emacs is stuck in the initialization, I can see a bash process running at 100% CPU. With ps, I can see the following entry for that process:

16722  -  Rs   0:11.06 /usr/local/bin/bash -l -i -c /usr/bin/printf '__RESULT\\000%s\\000%s' "${PATH-b9168ac2b328329c18cfb441f9af2938}" "${MANPATH-b9168ac2b328329c18cfb441f9af2938}"

This is almost certainly the process that Emacs is stuck waiting on, because the process disappears after C-g C-g. The only place where I can find anything resembling this in the source code is in ./elpa/exec-path-from-shell-20151006.2253/exec-path-from-shell.el. Adding exec-path-from-shell to dotspacemacs-excluded-packages in ~/.spacemacs seems to let the Emacs startup complete with no problems.

[cubranic]

The state of the UI when its stops responding:

[purcell]

This is almost certainly due to something odd in your .bashrc or other shell startup file which causes it to wait for input. Try temporarily removing those files to see if that helps.

[cubranic]

I recorded the results of my debugging in purcell/exec-path-from-shell#33, but the long story short: using exec-path-from-shell doesn't seem to work on FreeBSD and Bash because of some interaction of how Emacs runs Bash and Bash's interactive mode.

I'm not sure if Spacemacs might want to have a workaround in this case. Does it even need to run exec-path-from-shell when in X Windows? I thought the package is mainly for OS X (and use it there myself) because of how Mac restricts PATH for applications started from the GUI -- is there an X desktop environment that plays similar games with the environment variables?

[purcell]

I had a user report that it was necessary for them under X Windows. Not much info to go on, admittedly.

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Please let us know if this issue is still valid!

[cubranic]

I can’t check if this is still an issue because I don’t have a working FreeBSD any more. Is anyone subscribed to this issue who can say if the bug is still present on any of their systems, FreeBSD or otherwise?

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On Feb 29, 2020, at 2:19 PM, github-actions[bot] ***@***.***> wrote:  This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Please let us know if this issue is still valid! — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.