Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Cnews: relaynews getting 'illegal instruction' on SparcStation 1
Message-ID: <1989Dec12.021838.6598@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <4757@sater.cs.vu.nl>
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 89 02:18:38 GMT

In article <4757@sater.cs.vu.nl> sater@cs.vu.nl (Hans van Staveren) writes:
>One minor nit: if relaynews crashes, leaving a LOCK around, it would
>be kind of nice if newsrun detected that, and would remove the LOCK.
>Better of course would be relaynews not crashing...

We tend to follow the philosophy that says that dying processes represent
a major problem that should be investigated, and blindly removing the
lock and charging onward is often inappropriate.  Of course, if the thing
is dying at random, that's a case where a simple retry really is in order,
but one hopes that sort of problem is rare...

The real problem with doing anything about it is that there is no reliable,
portable, efficient way to determine whether a process is still alive.
-- 
1755 EST, Dec 14, 1972:  human |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
exploration of space terminates| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
