At Thursday 24 June 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> * Stefano Lattarini wrote on Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 10:32:02PM CEST:
> > At Thursday 24 June 2010, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > > Do you have an old system?
> >
> > Well, it's not new :-)
> >
> > $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
> > model name : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1800+
> >
> > $ free | awk '(NR == 2) { print $2 }'
> > 774904
>
> Hehe.
> model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.80GHz
> 1035964
>
> The RAM upgrade helped wonders.
Tell me about it. My original RAM size was 256Mb :-)
> >
> > I think that the possibility of a spurious failure here is very
> > very low. But I might be wrong, and it would fine by me having,
> > say, 100 tries every 3 seconds instead of 30 tries every 10
> > seconds. Your call.
>
> Just to avoid a possible misunderstanding here: the issue I want to
> avoid is that we kill an unrelated process due to PID reuse.
> That would be ugly.
Oops. You're right.
A test-specific wrapper script migth help here, e.g.:
cat >foo.sh <<END
#!/bin/sh
: > witness
$AUTOMAKE 2>stderr &
pid=$!
echo $pid > witness
wait $pid
rc=$?
rm -f witness
exit $?
END
Then we use "$SHELL foo.sh &" instead of "$AUTOMAKE &" and
"test -f witness" instead of "kill -0 $pid". If automake seems to
hang, we do "kill `cat witness`", which should eliminate (or extremely
reduce) any race condition. Do you think it would be worth the
hassle?
Regards,
Stefano
