Recently, when testing the installer, we noticed a weird issue. When ’emerge sync’ is run, rsync would complete the sync but not exit, which caused the install to hang. It took 2 days and a lot of frustration to finally track this one down. We owe the answer to d_m (on freenode).
The installer runs with 2 separate threads. The frontend is the main thread and the backend starts up a second thread to run the commands that perform the install. It turns out that when python creates a new thread, it blocks all signals for that thread. I’m not quite sure why. This has the side effect of blocking all signals for any processes that are fork()ed and/or exec()ed from that child thread.
Rsync fork()s when it’s doing it’s thing. One process waits for a USR2 signal from the other before they mutually exit. Since python had blocked all signals, the signal wasn’t getting from one process to another so they could exit. d_m’s solution was to write a small C program that resets the signal mask when running external programs. While this works, it is a huge hack. Although, this bug should be fixed in python 2.4 :-/
