[Python-ideas] IDEA: do not alter default SIGINT handling

[Mike Meyer]

On Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:16:21 +1000
Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> I think it's worth considering what the OP's real complaint is: namely, 
> that (some? all?) C extensions can't be interrupted by ctrl-C as the 
> user would expect. Is that a valid issue, or is it expected that Python 
> has no control over what happens inside the C extension?

I think it's valid. It's expected that the USER will have some control
over what's going on in a program - in particular, that they should be
able to interrupt it pretty much any time barring a bug of some
sort. The interaction between Python's default SIGINT handling and C
extensions breaks that expectation.

It's not clear what a good solution would be, though. This problem
exists for pretty much all signal handlers - they don't get a chance
to run if there's a misbehaving C extension executing.

The simplest solution is to just not handle SIGINT by default, which
raises the objection that try/finally doesn't "work". I don't think
this will matter in most cases; the finally block is usually freeing
up some resource that is going to be freed by the process exiting as
part of default SIGINT behavior. We've certainly had similarly subtle
changes that are much harder to deal with in the 2.X line.

To me, the nasty part of such a change is the loss of traceback on
SIGINT by default. During development, hitting C-C when the python
code is in an infinite loop pretty reliably provides a traceback that
nails down the problem. Yes, I could just boilerplate that into every
program, but part of python's attraction is that such things are so
seldom needed.

I suspect this might be best dealt with by documenting how C
extensions should behave with respect to signals - particularly SIGINT
- and providing sample code for doing so.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.

O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org