On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I forgot to pass G_SPAWN_DO_NOT_REAP_CHILD to g_spawn_async_with_pipes()
> and ended up scratching my head about why my GChildWatch callback wasn't
> firing. After some hot strace action and RTFM, I added that flag and
> everything worked perfectly. Do we need a warning like the one in the
> attached patch?
the waitpid(2) manual page lists a fair number of (sometimes complicated)
cases where ECHILD might be returned. so basically, i'd say catching all
cases portably where check_for_child_exited() could possibly end up with
ECHILD is rather hard. that means, appling your patch could possibly result
in developers having to chase racy conditions on secondary platforms, and
that'd be counter productive.
alternatives that came to mind after i read your patch are:
- prominently mark the need for G_SPAWN_DO_NOT_REAP_CHILD in the docs to
g_child_watch_add. but then i figured that is already the case (for
child_watch and g_spawn_async*)...
so maybe you have just ran into a sginificantly bad luck situation
where a documented detail escaped you...?
- introduce a "diagnostics" logging level. this is an idea i've been
pondering about for a while. basically, we could have something like
g_diag (domain, format, ...);
which does *not* produce any output by default, but will actually
print messages if G_DEBUG=diag is set.
and, these type of messages should always be compiled into programs
and libraries, regardless of debugging mode. that way, developers
can turn on extra diagnosis if they run into problems, and they
can also instruct users to produce more information in debugging
scenarios.
the warning you have in your patch would be perfectly suitable for
g_diag(), since most probably it'll be often useful, but seldomly
bogus (and the latter condition is must-not-have for warnings,
errors and assertions).
> Federico
---
ciaoTJ
_______________________________________________
gtk-devel-list mailing list
gtk-devel-list@gnome.org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
