[Twisted-Python] _twistd_unix.py / daemonize() / OSX / USING_FORK_WITHOUT_EXEC_IS_NOT_SUPPORTED_BY_FILE_MANAGER

Maarten ter Huurne maarten at treewalker.org
Thu Oct 14 12:31:39 EDT 2010


On Wednesday 13 October 2010, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
> To the extent that this is an intentional decision (it's at least half
> accidents of implementation) it's an attempt to allow twistd to actually
> display an error on the console if there is a serious error starting up,
> i.e. your plugin is not syntactically valid Python and it's just going
> to exit.
> 
> While I remember agreeing that it's unfortunate, I can't actually recall
> any issues with executing the script before forking.  Do we have tickets
> for them?  Can you describe a couple?

A long time ago I did run into trouble with the uid/gid being applied by 
twistd after the script is executed: log files would be owned by root 
instead of by the specified uid/gid.

This is not what you asked, but I guess it's also a consequence of the 
"execute the script first" behavior of twistd.

> If we are going to change this behavior, we should make twistd do
> something more correct, and optionally allow it to report startup errors
> to the console after it's forked, even if those errors don't necessarily
> crash it during startup.  This isn't rocket science, inheriting file
> descriptors and delaying exit are all pretty easy.

When using twistd from a typical Linux init script, forking first would lead 
to the script reporting the startup was a success and after that the error 
message would be printed.

Bye,
		Maarten



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