Re: indefinite hang in ./perl -I. -MTestInit ../ext/IO/t/io_multihomed.t

Abe Timmerman wrote:
> > So I'd suggest to handle this from the smoke kit : it can be run with
> > another perl, known to work with alarms and all this kind of stuff.
> 
> If someone could teach me how to do that (in a portable way), I'd be grateful. 
> The way I see it is: "the harness (either TEST or harness) should have direct 
> access to the 'pid' of a test and is thus capable of handling that process in 
> sort of a portable way". From within the Test::Smoke-suite I can't see a way 
> of handling individual tests in a portable way. I can catch each test's name 
> (from STDOUT) but I know not of a portible way to influence that process.

Patching t/TEST or t/harness to help is feasible.
For example, when run with some environment variable, the harness programs
could write the PID of the test currently running in t/smoke.pid.

We don't need complete portability ; having this safety measure on major
unixes should be enough. And on Cygwin :) (I don't remember tests hanging
on Windows or VMS.)