Re: maint-5.8@34289 on VMS

Craig A. Berry wrote:
> Given the rate of Nicholas's integrations, this is now somewhat old 
> news, but here's where things were as of sometime last night with a 
> -Dusethreads build on OpenVMS Alpha v8.3:
> 
> ext/threads/t/free2.........................FAILED--expected 78 tests, 
> saw 65
> ext/threads/t/free..........................FAILED--expected 29 tests, 
> saw 1
> 
> These are new and also fail in blead. The watchdog that is supposed to 
> only kill a stuck process is definitely not waiting 120 seconds, and 
> when it fires it takes out the process from which Perl was started.  
> Maybe that's intentional, but it did surprise me the first time my 
> telnet session disappeared.

It is a side effect of the method used to kill the perl process because 
of the difference between VMS and Unix.

On Unix the perl program runs with its own process ID.  With VMS, the 
perl program runs in the process ID of the shell.

So it is the shell that is being killed instead of the Perl program.

> 
> For now this is just a report, but I will start investigating that 
> watchdog and see if I can tame it.

We need to have a method of killing the Perl process with out killing 
the shell on VMS.

Since the test harness spawns a new shell for each test, it does not 
stop the test from running, but it sure makes it hard to do the debug.

-John
[email protected]
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