Re: [Quilt-dev] [patch 2/8]

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Jean Delvare wrote:
> Hi Gary,

Salut Jean,

> [Gary V. Vaughan]
>
> > Unless compiled specially just to avoid it, bash gives an occasional
> > disconcerting (but spurious) warning when a process at the receiving
> > side of a shell pipe closes before the sender has flushed all of its
> > data.
>
> I consider this to be a bug in bash. Half of the major Linux
> distributions do patch the bash they package to prevent this problem, so
> I am not alone.

Agreed.  But it is common practice to work around bugs in tools you
depend on if they have a significant installed base...

> > `quilt refresh' is particularly prone.
>
> True, but there are several other cases where the case can trigger.

I would've fixed those too as I tripped over them...

> > This patch simply redirects stderr to /dev/null in the one instance
> > that seems to be the root of the problem, and thus saves the bother
> > of recompiling bash.
>
> Redirecting stderr to /dev/null is not an acceptable solution, sorry.

Why not?

There must be a middle ground between expecting a significant proportion
of the installed user base to compile a special bash just for quilt at
one extreme, and have them put up with spurious error messages at the
other?

> See my post on this topic 4 months ago:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/quilt-dev/2005-05/msg00031.html
> It got no answer unfortunately.

Easy test: $ cvs diff | (exit 1)

> The only thing we can do is probably to document the problem, and ask
> remaining distributions (Linux or not) to apply the patch fixing the
> problem when building their bash package. Maybe then the bash folks will
> finally agree that this should be made the default.

So when bash 3.1 comes out in 2007, and vendors release OSes that adopt 
it 6 months later, it might reach widespread in about 3 or 4 years.
I still think a user friendly work around until then is perfectly
reasonable!

Cheers,
        Gary.
--
Gary V. Vaughan      ())_.  address@hidden,gnu.org}
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