Re: [PATCH 4/4] send-pack: abort sideband demuxer on pack-objects error

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 10:43:33PM +0200, Johannes Sixt wrote:

> > > In the threaded case, this fd is closed by start_command(), where it is
> > > passed as po.out in pack_objects(). In the fork case this is too late
> > > because a duplicate was already inherited to the sideband demuxer.
> >
> > Hrm, I see the code now. That seems like an odd thing to do to me.
> 
> Why so? It's a matter of resource ownership: If you pass a positive value, you 
> give away ownership; if you pass -1, you gain ownership; if you pass 0, 
> ownership remains unchanged.

I can see how that is useful. Mostly I was just surprised, because I
wouldn't expect ownership to be transferred there.

> > Doesn't it disallow:
> >
> >   /* set up a command */
> >   const char **argv = { "some", "command" };
> >   struct child_process c;
> >   c.argv = argv;
> >   c.out = fd;
> >
> >   /* run it */
> >   run_command(&c);
> >
> >   /* now tack our own output to the end */
> >   write(fd, "foo", 3);
> 
> You would have to dup() the fd before run_command().

True. That makes it less of a big deal, because for the times that you
don't want full ownership transferred, you can work around it.

> > And even weirder, we only do the close for high file descriptors. So you
> > _can_ do that above if "fd" is stdout, but not with an arbitrary fd.
> 
> Ah, right, that's a bit dubious. The reason is that if you want to tell the 
> child process to use the parent's stdout for its own stdout, you specify 0 
> aka "no special treatement", i.e. just inherit from the parent, not 1. IOW, 1 
> is never a sane candidate to be assigned to c.out.

Fair enough.

So what do you want to do about the fd that needs closing? The options
I see are:

  1. Try for a general solution. That probably means the "close every
     descriptor in the child" hackiness that I mentioned earlier.

  2. Fix this case by having the async code close it if it was forked.
     It needs to know whether we forked, so we can:

       a. Use NO_PTHREADS. Easy and simple, though it does break
          start_async's abstraction a bit.

       b. Have start_async pass in a flag telling what happened. This
          really breaks the abstraction very similarly to (a), but it
          makes the connection more explicit.

I think I am leaning a bit towards (2a). It's simple, and it's not like
this is library code with a million unknown callers; fixing it simply
and cleanly with a nice commit message is probably sufficient.

-Peff