Re: [Monotone-devel] auto updates

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Timothy" == Timothy Brownawell <Timothy> writes:

    Timothy> Oh, right, we do actually. spawn(program, ...) . We
    Timothy> actually implement execute(program, ...) with spawn() and
    Timothy> wait(). However, I don't think we have a way collect
    Timothy> finished child processes; our only wait() function is a
    Timothy> blocking wait for that particular child (tester exposes a
    Timothy> version of wait that has a timeout, which could maybe be
    Timothy> useful for something like this, maybe we should make it
    Timothy> available in monotone as well?). So while you can
    Timothy> spawn-in-background directly you'll probably end up with
    Timothy> lots of zombies, which IIRC is bad.

Hmmm...

Me thinks if I do something like

execute("daemon",...)

where daemon is the following program:

Package: daemon
Priority: optional
Section: utils
Installed-Size: 332
Maintainer: Marc Haber <address@hidden>
Architecture: powerpc
Version: 0.6.3-1
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4)
Filename: pool/main/d/daemon/daemon_0.6.3-1_powerpc.deb
Size: 111398
MD5sum: 3a9064b5a95b3af19db2a4abe7d324fa
SHA1: 045aefdf4c09e0aeca47fc37b769bc136125a2b6
SHA256: 9a934404a1f08d81e211fac161a07973292ad4b18a50c516271b1297986a10bb
Description: turns other processes into daemons
 There are many tasks that need to be performed to correctly set up a
 daemon process. This can be tedious. Daemon performs these tasks for
 other processes. This is useful for writing daemons in languages other
 than C, C++ or Perl (e.g. /bin/sh, Java).
 .
 If you want to write daemons in languages that can link against C functions
 (e.g. C, C++), see libslack which contains the core functionality of daemon.
 .
 Upstream URL: http://www.libslack.org/daemon/
Tag: admin::configuring, interface::daemon, made-of::lang:c, role::sw:utility


I might start getting somewhere. As a bonus, this should automatically
check to see if any process is already running first before starting a
new process, etc (it supports all the daemon stuff like PID files, log
files, stdout/stderr redirection, etc).

I will think more about this tomorrow.

It should solve the problem with zombies, and possible other problems
we haven't yet thought of, too.
-- 
Brian May <address@hidden>