On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 09:42:50AM +0200, Max Leske wrote:
> Hi folks.
> 
> I?m running into an issue when forking images with OSProcess in headless images. In older versions of OSProcess #forkSqueak would try to fork in any case, independent of the presence of or the connection state to XDisplayControlPlugin.
> In dtl.57 #forkSqueak was changed to explicitly check if XDisplayControlPlugin is present and can be controlled. This is obviously a good thing for when the image runs headful. In my case however I can no longer fork my headless image, even though I don?t need an X session.
> 
> Important: apparently #safeToForkSqueak answers true if the XDisplayControlPlugin is available, even in a headless image. But since we don?t need windows, we don?t install X libraries on our server and so #safeToForkSqueak answers false. So the whole thing boils down to a situation where Squeak / Pharo is run in an environment where the XDisplayPlugin can?t be loaded but where forking is still possible.
> 
> I don?t know how to do this in a cross platform way but for Pharo we could extend #safeToForkSqueak with a headless check like this:
> 
> safeToForkSqueak
> 	"The forkSqueak method is currently supported only for X11 displays with
> 	XDisplayControlPlugin available. If the plugin is not available, the child Squeak
> 	VM will continue interacting with the X display, which leads to errors in the
> 	parent Squeak, including VM crashes."
> 
> 	^self canControlXDisplay
> 		or: [ Smalltalk isHeadless ]
> 
> 
> I?m going to dirty patch this for my images because I really need it but I think some version of this patch would be a good thing to integrate into OSProcess.
> 

Thanks Max,

I added your patch to the OSP repository. I added a check so that it will work
on classic Squeak 3.8 as well as the latest Squeak trunk and Pharo.

Dave