On Sun, Mar 27 2016, Joey Hess <i...@joeyh.name> wrote: > Had a weird thing where my window manager's hotkey to start assword gui > stopped doing anything. Apparently assword is trying to print out a warning > (WARNING: could not validate OpenPGP signature on db file) and for some reason > stderr is closed, so it crashes > > write(2, "print >>sys.stderr, \"WARNING: co"..., 80) = -1 EIO (Input/output > error) > close(4) = 0 > munmap(0x7fea62219000, 4096) = 0 > write(2, "IOError", 7) = -1 EIO (Input/output error) > write(2, ": ", 2) = -1 EIO (Input/output error) > write(2, "[Errno 5] Input/output error", 28) = -1 EIO (Input/output error) > write(2, "\n", 1) = -1 EIO (Input/output error) > > I have no idea why my window manager is suddenly running the program with a > closed or unwritable stderr, but probably crashing in this situation is not > useful, so how about you catch this exception so that the gui can still > display. Especially since the gui helpfully displays the same warning..
Hey, Joey. I'm trying to decide how reasonable it is for a program to expect that stderr be available, and what exactly it should do if it's not. Having to wrap all stderr write attempts with catches for this kind of thing seems a bit onerous to me, even for guis. Are we sure this isn't just a issue that should be addressed with the window manager? To be clear, I'm open to catching this in assword as you suggest, but I would like to understand the expectation for stderr (or stdout for that matter) availability. Just out of curiosity, what window manager are you using? jamie.
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