Re: Economic Science eats my process output
On Tue, 7 May 2002, Alastair Burt stipulated:
I live in XEmacs and execute many shell commands with the backgroud
package. Unfortunately, on upgrading to XEmacs 21.4.7 this package no
longer works for me.
Now fixed, I think; see xemacs-patches (although I can't see how the bug
I introduced could cause background.el to malfunction, it obviously
has).
Curiously, if I type '(background "sh")', and then
'input' 'ls' at the
shell prompt, then I do see the directory contents.
The two Emacs' were configured with the same options. Has anything changed
in the process handling code between versions?
Yes. The change fixed a race condition whereby XEmacs could fail to
notice that a process had died and try to send it a signal, and arranged
for output sent before the process died but not received by the time it
died to get thrown away.
Whoops.
(How on earth did I fail to notice this? How come I still can't
reproduce it, even now I know what the problem is? How did everyone else
hopefully running the prereleases with this patch fail to notice this?
I don't know, but this is all very timing-related, so some people will
be being constantly bitten, while other lucky souls will be, well,
lucky...)
--
`Blueshifters were moving away... Redshifters were moving in...'
--- Justina Robson, _Mappa Mundi_, with startling new
evidence for the gib gnab hypothesis