[Quilt-dev] Broken pipe on quilt commands

[Jean Delvare]

Hi all,

Since I am using quilt, I got "Broken pipe" error messages from times to
times, most frequently when refreshing large patches, but also at times
on "quilt push". No harm done as far as I could see, but still annoying.
Searching the list archive, I found similar reports [1], from which I
think I understand that the problem is caused by bash not having been
compiled with -DDONT_REPORT_SIGPIPE, while quilt assumes it has.

Andreas, back in September 2004 you were stating that you didn't want
quilt to be modified to read all files to their end to solve the problem
[2]. Is it still your position?

I personally find it questionable that quilt was specifically written to
use bash, yet doesn't work with it in its default configuration. At
least Gentoo and Slackware do not define DONT_REPORT_SIGPIPE for their
bash packages; looks like Red Hat does; I don't know about the other
distributions. I think it is a problem that quilt will not work properly
by default on a number of major distributions.

BTW, how may I test whether a given bash was compiled with
DONT_REPORT_SIGPIPE? In an earlier post, Andreas suggested:
        cat file | awk '{exit}'
        cat file | true
but both work for me on a system where quilt sometimes issues "Broken
pipe" error messages (until I use a freshly compiled bash, that is), so
I know these tests are not reliable.

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/quilt-dev/2005-01/msg00008.html
[2] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/quilt-dev/2004-09/msg00005.html

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare