Petter Reinholdtsen <p...@hungry.com> writes:
> Hi. Today I needed a way to run a cron job with a lock file, and really
> missed
> this script in a Debian package. Please have a look and see if you can
> include
> it in the lockfile-progs package.
Thanks for the ping, and I took some time to work on this:
- I noticed the script has a different license from the rest of
lockfile-progs, but while I'd prefer to have a single license, that
might not be critical, and I could of course talk to the authors.
- While looking at the script, I noticed changes that I'd want to make
before incorporating it -- with respect to error handling, signals,
string escaping, etc.
- After a bit of effort I realized that solidly handling the bits I
was interested in might actually be easier in C, which would also
fit better with the rest of lockfile-progs. So I spent some time,
off and on over a few days, working on a C version.
- During that process, I realized both that there are enough corner
cases that it would take some time to get everything right, and that
I also don't really know exactly how I think a general purpose
wrapper like this should behave (something that would definitely
need to be sorted out first). As just one example, I'm not sure how
it could know (without being told) whether or not it should remove
the lockfile if the child process fails -- and perhaps the answer
depends in some cases on just how it fails).
So in the end, I suspect that creating a wrapper like this that I'd want
to maintain over the long run is likely to be more work than I should
undertake at the moment.
In any case, sorry I can't help more directly right now, but I'll keep
this in mind; it's possible I might poke at it again later.
Thanks
--
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
GPG as of 2011-07-10 E6A9 DA3C C9FD 1FF8 C676 D2C4 C0F0 39E9 ED1B 597A
GPG as of 2002-11-03 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592 F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4
