Jonathan Corbet  writes:

> (As an aside, does anybody know why the signal module doesn't have
> sigaction() and sigprocmask()?  Is it just that nobody has ever
> implemented it, or is there a deeper reason?)

Hahahahahahahahaha!

Yes, there's a reason.  I implemented a patch for Python 2.3 to
implement them, but had to disable it because of exceptionally
exciting interactions with various platforms' threading libraries.
You didn't even need to start a thread -- on some platforms the mere
presence of -lpthread (or whatever) is enough to make the signal
procmask handling go bananas.  If you want to try to get it working
reliably, be my guest.

Cheers,
M.

--
  After a heavy night I travelled on, my face toward home - the comma
  being by no means guaranteed.           -- paraphrased from cam.misc