The good news:
The horrendous swapping behavior of 1.2.13 is much improved. Previously,
every time I built xemacs, the system locked up solid for about 10
seconds while it dumped out the xemacs executable, and it lagged seriously
during the link phase. (And some of you may remember my rants about
other much more horrid behavior that would happen if you had a runaway
program, often necessitating a hard reboot.) In 1.3.72, the lag is not
so great even when dumping, and hardly noticeable at all during link.
I even had a better test (although unintentional): for some unknown
reason, an `etags' process of mine just ballooned to 95 megs before
finishing, and although the lag became quite noticeable, it didn't
bring the machine to its knees.
The bad news:
-- xemacs broke totally with binutils 2.6.0.9.good, but luckily
binutils 2.6.0.10 came out before I began to tear out my
nonexistent hair over this. (the sole change between the two
distributions is "an emacs-related problem in ld was fixed" :)
-- sendmail stopped working (complaints about "Unable to lockf():
bad file number") but recompiling it fixed the problems.
-- network things don't seem to work quite as well, and diald in
particular, although I can't quite put my finger on it yet.
-- once I got a timeout from the aic7xxx driver at bootup and
I had to power-cycle; although this wasn't reproducible.
(never happened under 1.2.13 with the Nov 12 aic7xxx driver)
-- (some other things like make and ps broke but they've been
well-discussed on this list so they don't really count as
bad news)
ben