Re: Weird failure with latches in curculio on v15

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 11:58 AM Andres Freund  wrote:
> > 9a740f81e clearly made things a lot worse, but it wasn't great
> > before.  Can we see a way forward to removing the problem entirely?
>
> Yea, I think we can - we should stop relying on system(). If we instead
> run the command properly as a subprocess, we don't need to do bad things
> in the signal handler anymore.

I like the idea of not relying on system(). In most respects, doing
fork() + exec() ourselves seems superior. We can control where the
output goes, what we do while waiting, etc. But system() runs the
command through the shell, so that for example you don't have to
invent your own way of splitting a string into words to be passed to
exec[whatever](). I've never understood how you're supposed to get
that behavior other than by calling system().

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com