Puppet

(Submitted as requested by Jeff McCune)

I’ve been fighting these annoying hangs for a day and a bit and finally have something I believe works. It’s not elegant (the approaches I took became steadily more hacky…) but it seems to work for me.

I started using a trimmed version of util.rb:execute, asking it run run “apt-get install osirisd”. strace()ing this showed the read() being restarted. The child process had died but puppet was still reading from the pipe.

I tried using readpartial and read_nonblock but these didn’t seem to capture the stdout and stderr (no idea why – they worked in the trimmed version but not when run in puppet).

I then tried using pipes and also spawning threads to either do the reads (using readpartial) or to do the Process.waitpid and then close the file descriptor. Again, this worked in the trimmed version but not in puppet (neither stdout or stderr were captured).

Finally in desperation I thought “sod it” and redirected the child process to a temporary file. This appears to work but I’ve only tried a few simple tests on it.

I’ve attached two diffs against 0.22.4 – a full diff and a diff excluding whitespace differences.