[Xapian-discuss] minor problem

[Deron Meranda]

On Dec 23, 2007 10:58 PM, Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:
> The semantics of fcntl() locking within a process are rather unhelpful,
> so we fork a child process to take and hold the lock for us.  To
> minimise VM use, we just exec /bin/cat once the lock is obtained.

Olly, I've been curious about this; what kind of troublesome fcntl
semantics were you running into that necessitated this child
lock-holding process?  This locking style is rather unusual to me.

Also, I first stumbled into this accidentally when trying to run
under Linux with some rather tight SELinux security policies
in place...the exec of /bin/cat was failing because of denied
permissions that I had no idea that the library required.
I assume most people won't try using it in such an environment though.
-- 
Deron Meranda