Re: forking in setsid

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>]

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Hi folks--

I'm not subscribed to the util-linux mailing list (it's a firehose i
don't have the capacity to drink from), so please keep me Cc'ed on
replies.

I'm sorry that my original report was to debian only, and was not
forwarded upstream until now, but i appreciate Damien Wyert dusting it
off.

When i originally wrote http://bugs.debian.org/495881, i asked the
following question:

> I don't understand /usr/bin/setsid terribly well: is this difference
> in behavior [between setsid as process group leader or not-leader]
> desirable for some reason?  If so, why?  The shipped documentation
> (setsid(1)) makes no mention of these behavioral inconsistencies.

These questions arose from struggling with setsid in the context of some
work with ssh, in particular the thread starting here:

 http://marc.info/?l=openssh-unix-dev&m=121927018112558&w=2

i ended up resolving that problem without needing to use setsid, and i
think i came away from it (due to the aforementioned behavioral
inconsistencies) with the sense that /usr/bin/setsid wasn't actually a
particularly reliable or predictable tool.

I don't know whether it's more appropriate to try to fix it, to provide
a "--behave-consistently-regardless-of-pg-leader-status" option, or just
to document the weirdnesses, but i would certainly be curious to know if
there are users of setsid that rely on this strange set of behaviors.

Regards,

        --dkg

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