Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!think!ames!ubvax!vsi1!altnet!edc From: edc@ALTOS.COM (Eric Christensen) Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm Subject: Re: Handling Elm bug releases Message-ID: <502@altnet.ALTOS.COM> Date: 22 Jun 88 09:01:21 GMT References: <1080@bellboy.UUCP> <180003@hpsrli.HP.COM> Reply-To: edc@altnet.UUCP (Eric Christensen) Organization: Altos Computer Systems, San Jose, CA. Lines: 37 In article <180003@hpsrli.HP.COM> darrylo@hpsrli.HP.COM (Darryl Okahata) writes: >In comp.mail.elm, edc@ALTOS.COM (Eric Christensen) writes: > >> Ah! Surprise, surprise, surprise! You're /bin/mail (or sendmail, or whatever >> you're using for a delivery agent) catches a signal and terminates when it's >> parent dies. (Incidently, this is really a very stupid thing for a mail delivery >> agent to do :-( ) I've seen this with various versions of Xenix 3.? and V7. I >> also have seen it in at least one port of System V. > > This may be an Elm bug. I seem to remember a patch to Elm 1.7 that fixed >a similar problem that occured if you exited Elm and then quickly logged out. >Basically, a SIGHUP signal was being sent to the process spawned by Elm, and >that signal was not being caught. The fix was to change Elm to ignore the >signal (I think). You're right, it was an Elm bug. I got to thinking about it afterwards, and pulled my 1.5 sources off of tape to have a look. Sure enough, 1.5 assumed that the delivery agent was smart enough to finish what it's doing before it exits. This is fine if you have sendmail, but some USG versions of /bin/mail are brain damaged. I'm happy to report that 2.0 takes into account the possibility of a stupid delivery agent. I looked for the patch you mention, but I couldn't find it. That's not to say that there isn't one, just that I don't have it archived anywhere sensible. If someone had that patch lurking around somewhere, could they please repost it? -- +-------------------------+---------------------------------------------------+ | Eric D. Christensen | Email: edc@altnet.altos.com (uunet!altnet!edc) | | Altos Computer Systems +---------------------------------------------------+ | 399 West Trimble Road | Definitions: Bug - An Undocumented Feature | | San Jose, Ca. 95131 | Feature - A Documented Bug | +-------------------------+---------------------------------------------------+ | These views aren't Altos' - They're mine, all mine, and you can't have them | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+