-> On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 08:16:04AM -0700, Titus Brown wrote:
-> > Incidentally, while we're on the topic of error handling, the default error
-> > mailing (calling /usr/lib/sendmail) cannot be safely used from inside a
-> > threaded program.
->
-> Why is that?

I've been told (and this is mysticism for me still ;) that executing
fork()s from inside threaded programs is unsafe.  The person telling me this
was Jim Davidson, one of the main maintainers of AOLserver; it may hold
only for AOLserver.

Looking at the pthread man pages, and doing some heavy interpretation of
various past recollections, I think that fork() does not behave in a
consistent manner within threaded programs.

Here's the clearest statement I've seen yet:

        http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/tech-notes/forking.html

It's still not very clear ;(.  If you have any insight, I would very much
appreciate it!

Another vague recollection I have is that locking does some weird things --
like, locks may or may not be duplicated by the fork() child, so you could
end up with some deadlock situations.

-> > It might be nice to provide a standard option to specify a mail server
-> > & then switch to using smtplib.
->
-> There is already a sendmail module with Quixote.  It should be easy to
-> make publish use that instead.

ok.

->   so-much-code-so-little-time-ly-y'rs Neil

with ya...

cheers,
--titus