On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 4:45 AM David Teller <dtel...@mozilla.com> wrote: > What is our policy on using Unix signals on Firefox? I am currently > reviewing a patch by external contributors that involves inotify's > signal API, and I assume it's a bad idea, but I'd like to ask around > first before sending them back to the drawing board.
I don't think we have a policy, per se; certainly we already have uses of signals in the JS engine's wasm implementation and the Gecko profiler. But in those cases, signals are basically the only way to do what we want. If there were alternative ways to accomplish those tasks besides signals, I think we would have avoided signals. inotify looks like it has a file descriptor-based interface which seems perfectly usable. Not being familiar with inotify beyond reading http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/inotify.7.html, is there a reason to prefer the signal interface versus the file descriptor interface? We use the standard gio/gtk event loop, so hooking up the returned file descriptor from inotify_init should not be onerous. widget/gtk/nsAppShell.cpp even contains some code to crib from: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/widget/gtk/nsAppShell.cpp#275-281 -Nathan _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
