Re: [Haskell-cafe] Discussion: The CLOEXEC problem

On 07/24/2015 09:22 PM, Donn Cave wrote:

Quoth David Turner ,

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Could you be a bit more specific? Which bits of pre-existing software didn't have a FD_CLOEXEC bit and would be broken by this proposal?

Well, of course to be precise, the bit's always there, it's just normally not set - that's the normal environment that anything written up to now would expect. And of course, anything that depends on a GHC-opened file to stay open over an exec would be broken. I can't enumerate the software that meets that criterion.

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Since Python recently decided to go through this exact transition, their experience should be instructive. Do you know if there was negative fallout from PEP 0466?

I gave up on Python a long time ago and don't follow what goes on. If recently means less than a decade or so, though, it's not much to go on. If the problem addressed by the O_CLOEXEC proposal is obscure, the problems it may create are even more so - I'll certainly concede that - and it could take a lot of experience before those problems would be well known enough to show up if you went looking for them.

It seems to me that discovering a "FD-was-unexpectedly-closed-before-it-was-supposed-to" problem is a lot more likely than discovering FD leaks, no? (Not that I'm advocating any particular solution to this -- backward compatibility is a harsh mistress.) Regards,