Hello! A couple of months ago we ran into a strange problem with signals in our application stack. Whenever lucene was loaded, our application didn't react to SIGINT (ctrl + c) properly. Instead of shutting down step by step the server stopped immediately.
It took me a while to figure out that lucene.initVM() replaces Python's SIGINT handler with a new signal handler. Python's SIGINT handler is responsible for raising a KeyboardInterrupt exception when ctrl+c is pressed. The JVM grabs a whole bunch of signals for its own purpose and thus disables all signal handlers installed before initVM(). The fact is well documented at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/i-signalhandling/ together with an easy solution (-Xrs option). Sun's JVM behaves equally. My Python package smc.lucene goes a slightly different way. It saves all Python signal handlers before initVM() is called and restores them afterwards. However that's not an appropriate solution for an embedded Python interpreter (Python embedded in Apache via mod_python which itself hosts an embedded JVM via JCC). Andi, do you see a way to fix the problem inside initVM() anytime soon? Christian
