Miquel van Smoorenburg writes ("Re: gzip and dpkg problem"):
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> Ian Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >This means that SIGPIPE was set to SIG_IGN when dpkg started. For
> >reasons too complicated to explain here this means that dpkg can't do
> >proper error trapping (it always gets an error indication, and can't
> >tell whether it's really an error).
>
> Can't you just set signal(SIGPIPE, SIG_DFL) first thing in the
> main() function of dpkg? And if not, could you tell me why not
> (sounds interesting ;))
Yes, I *could* do that. However, if I did I would simply be covering
up a problem which ought to be a problem for many programs other than
dpkg but which isn't solely because of sloppy programming.
If I add any code to dpkg with respect to this it'll be a check which
makes it bomb out with an informative message. See, for example, my
approach to trying to run dpkg with a bad PATH.
Ian.
