Re: [PATCH] be paranoid about closed stdin/stdout/stderr

From: Stephen R. van den Berg <srb@cuci.nl>
Date: Aug 27, 2008, 09:04 UTC
Message-ID: <20080827090423.GA484@cuci.nl>
In-Reply-To: <quack.20080826T2005.lthzlmz2m4g@roar.cs.berkeley.edu>

Karl Chen wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

>Yes, I can work around this issue with sh -c 'git fetch
>0</dev/null', and maybe it shouldn't close(0) in the first place.
>But I don't see the harm in being safe.  It's one less potential
>surprise for users.  This is the first program I've encountered
>that broke due to stdin being closed, and it took debugging to
>figure out that was the reason.

I understand the reasoning, and there sure is a valid point in here (principle of least surprise), but there is also the case of hiding problems. It's a bit unclear which should prevail here. The point is that if you actually make git detect and correct closed descriptors which should have been open, then you are merely passing the buck to all other programs the user is starting which might or might not break.

Maybe the breakage of other programs is only in conjunction with full-moon and FD 0 closed, in that case you make the problems/bugs even *harder* to find for the user by making git "fix it for you".

-- 
Sincerely,
           Stephen R. van den Berg.
"First, God created idiots.  That was just for practice.
 Then he created school boards."  --  Mark Twain