run-command: teach async threads to ignore SIGPIPE

Async processes can be implemented as separate forked
processes, or as threads (depending on the NO_PTHREADS
setting). In the latter case, if an async thread gets
SIGPIPE, it takes down the whole process. This is obviously
bad if the main process was not otherwise going to die, but
even if we were going to die, it means the main process does
not have a chance to report a useful error message.

There's also the small matter that forked async processes
will not take the main process down on a signal, meaning git
will behave differently depending on the NO_PTHREADS
setting.

This patch fixes it by adding a new flag to "struct async"
to block SIGPIPE just in the async thread. In theory, this
should always be on (which makes async threads behave more
like async processes), but we would first want to make sure
that each async process we spawn is careful about checking
return codes from write() and would not spew endlessly into
a dead pipe. So let's start with it as optional, and we can
enable it for specific sites in future patches.

The natural name for this option would be "ignore_sigpipe",
since that's what it does for the threaded case. But since
that name might imply that we are ignoring it in all cases
(including the separate-process one), let's call it
"isolate_sigpipe". What we are really asking for is
isolation. I.e., not to have our main process taken down by
signals spawned by the async process. How that is
implemented is up to the run-command code.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/run-command.h b/run-command.h
index c0969c7695..a3043b16df 100644
--- a/run-command.h
+++ b/run-command.h
@@ -116,6 +116,7 @@ struct async {
 	int proc_in;
 	int proc_out;
 #endif
+	int isolate_sigpipe;
 };
 
 int start_async(struct async *async);