Re: [Monotone-devel] auto updates

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 02:11:12AM -0600, Timothy Brownawell wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-10-29 at 00:36 -0700, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> > I don't know offhand if we have a spawn-in-background function exposed
> > to hooks, though even if we don't, you could hack it by executing the
> > shell and putting "&" at the end of your command line :-).
> 
> Oh, right, we do actually. spawn(program, ...) . We actually implement
> execute(program, ...) with spawn() and wait(). However, I don't think we
> have a way collect finished child processes; our only wait() function is
> a blocking wait for that particular child (tester exposes a version of
> wait that has a timeout, which could maybe be useful for something like
> this, maybe we should make it available in monotone as well?). So while
> you can spawn-in-background directly you'll probably end up with lots of
> zombies, which IIRC is bad.

It should be possible to deal with zombies through some POSIX hackery,
no?  The only tricky bit is that we _do_ sometimes want to wait for a
process, so we can't just unconditionally get rid of zombies...

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to
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