Subj : Re: Semaphore
To   : Nick Andre
From : Rob Swindell
Date : Mon Jan 18 2021 12:06:52

  Re: Re: Semaphore
  By: Nick Andre to Rob Swindell on Mon Jan 18 2021 05:20 am

 > On 17 Jan 21  18:42:46, Rob Swindell said the following to Nick Andre:
 >
 > RS> Yeah, you're not understanding what I'm saying. BinkD could pretty
 > RS> easily s a flag when it receives a signal (whatever signal, it doesn't
 > RS> have to be SIGTERM) and then terminate ***when idle**. It sounds like
 > RS> you're opposed t the use of a signal for some reasson.
 >
 > Yeah, I'm not opposed to signals.

Ah, it seemed like you were.

 > Its not that difficult to understand the
 > intention of the request. This is a very busy Hub system where I'd like to
 > schedule maintainence when BinkD twiddles its thumbs. Whether thats done
 > with semaphore files or signals doesn't matter to me. If someone shows me
 > how to accomplish my request on Windows then wonderful... that person gets
 > simple kudos and the echo goes back to crickets chirping.

https://www.computerhope.com/taskkill.htm

 > That said, traditional or legacy mailers on DOS, Windows and OS/2 have
 > always reacted to semaphore files. My software, Frontdoor, Intermail,
 > TBBS/Flame,
 > etc. as well as Internet Rex. What I "don't understand" is the apparent
 > visceral reaction by some to have that same simple level of functionality as
 > the rest. The mere suggestion just gets everyone's rulers out to measure how
 > big their Linux egos are.

No, I think it's more a question of choosing a better design. Polling a file system for a file's existence is heavy-handed and slow; do it frequent enough and you'll create an observable impact on the performance of the system. Handling a signal on the other hand adds no system or application performance overhead - it's like an interrupt, there's no polling (and definitely no disk or file system access) involved.

That said, BSO mailers obviously have to poll the file system frequently anyway since that's just how they work, so adding yet-another-file to check for wouldn't likely make much difference. It's just another less than ideal design tacked on top of another less than ideal design.

 > Its been running here for many years trouble-free... its not the end of the
 > world if it can't do one little thing. Any further discussion or quote-rants
 > or whatever silly symantecs and we have to cough up royalties to Mark Lewis.

It wouldn't be a big change to binkd and it's open source. Try addig it (starting with breaksig.c), if you need help, just ask.
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