bug#23074: 25.1.50; X11: `use-fancy-splash-screens-p` erroneously returns nil.

[John Hawkinson]

Sorry for the necropost; I hope this reopens properly.

Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> wrote on Sat, 15 Aug 2020
at 00:22:16 EDT in 
<CADwFkmk6adGnng8-8eTVtth=8tRTyFEwuWKBvFGkhkG+pptb4g@mail.gmail.com>:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Ping!  I'd like to fix this problem for Emacs 25.1, if possible.
...
> More information was requested, but none was given within 4 years, so
> I'm closing this bug.  If this is still an issue, please reply to this
> email (use "Reply to all" in your email client) and we can reopen the
> bug report.

This is still an issue, I think. I upgraded from Emacs 24.3 to 27.2 this 
morning, and the first thing I noticed was the missing splash screen graphic.

Notably,
https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/20976/x11-why-is-the-emacs-logo-image-missing-on-the-welcome-screen
recommends adjusting use-fancy-splash-screens-p's calculation constants, so I 
suspect that may be what a lot of people do.

It seems that:
  (add-to-list 'initial-frame-alist '(height . 37)) ;; originally 36

is also sufficient to solve the problem. I'm not sure if that's the
right way to change the frame height, and where the default actually
comes from?

Also, I don't wnat to go too far deep into what's probably an unrelated issue, 
but I suspect part of the trigger here is that I *always* see at startup:
  Auto-save file lists were found.  If an Emacs session crashed recently,
  type M-x recover-session RET to recover the files you were editing.

and it has always seemed like session recovery under OS X is never working 
quite right -- M-x recover-session shows me 5 years worth of greyed-out 
.saves*~ twiddle files, which rarely seem tbe recoverable. I'm not sure if 
something is actually wrong or if users are expected to manually delete 
seemingly now-irrelevnt unrecoverabke sesson save files, but consequently this 
message on the splash screens is a normal condition for me.

--
jhawk@alum.mit.edu
John Hawkinson