Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
Matthew Woodcraft <matthew@woodcraft.me.uk> wrote:
(The program handles SIGTERM so that it can do a bit of cleanup before exiting, and it uses the signal-handler-sets-a-flag technique. The call that might be interrupted is sleep(), so the program doesn't strictly _rely_ on the existing behaviour; it would just become very slow to exit.)
So, if it's just for process exit, just let the signal handler raise an exception and catch the exception at the top-level.
I wouldn't recommend that anyone take this advice. The signal might come at some time other than the sleep(), and introducing an exception which can mysteriously appear at abitrary points is not a way to make life easier. Nonetheless I'm sure my program would be easy enough to fix to use set_wakeup_fd() or signalfd() if necessary. I'm not saying we shouldn't make this backwards-incompatible change because it will be hard to update existing programs to cope; I'm saying we shouldn't pretend it doesn't count as a backwards-incompatible change. In any case I think PEP 475 should be explaining what is going to happen to signal.siginterrupt(). Will setting flag=True be supported? If so, will doing so change the behaviour of those parts of the stdlib which have already been modified to retry after EINTR? (I think it would be helpful if we could tell people "if you want the old EINTR behaviour, just do this simple thing". And I suppose siginterrupt flag=True is a candidate for that.) -M-