bug#20555: Emacs 24.2 vs 24.4 on Solaris: M-x shell and "tty => not a tty"

[Paul Eggert]

[moving this to bug-gnu-emacs, so that it gets a proper bug number]

Georges Ko wrote:
> What were the changes done on Emacs 24.4 regarding subshells (or
> processes), compared to version 24.2?

Quite a few, I suspect.  You can use 'diff' to find out the details....

> When compiled in the same environment, "tty" in a subshell
> (M-x shell) has different outputs:
>
>    - in Emacs 24.2, "tty" outputs the tty,
>    - in Emacs 24.4, "tty" outputs "not a tty".
>
> That is, if I run the command below to spawn a shell:
>
>    (apply 'start-process "shell" "*shell*" "/bin/ksh" '("-i"))
>
>    - in Emacs 24.2, "ps" shows the shell has a normal tty,
>    - in Emacs 24.4, "ps" shows the shell has a tty with "?".

I don't observe either problem when running Emacs 24.5 under Solaris 11 x86-64 
compiled with the bundled GCC (4.5.2).  However, I do observe them when running 
Emacs 24.5 under Solaris 10 sparc compiled with Sun C 5.13.

> I couldn't compile 24.3 due to some errors, so I don't know its behavior.

Emacs 24.3 is bundled within Solaris 11.2, for what it's worth.

If you're still running into problems, I suggest replying with details of how 
you built Emacs (version of OS and compiler, 'configure' arguments, log from 
'configure' and 'make', etc.).

PS.  This looks a bit like Bug#9150 <http://bugs.gnu.org/9150>, but that bug was 
in an older Emacs, which probably means it's independent.