Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> That's part of the reason why I won't pursue these changes here. To me 
>> these changes are just as important as the ones that I posted for 
>> Delay and Semaphore. However, unless one understands the kinds of 
>> problems that are caused by the current code it is pointless to argue 
>> that fixing them is important - I'm sure that unless people had been 
>> bitten by Delay and Semaphore we would have the same kinds of debates 
>> with all sorts of well-meant advise on how you "ought" to write your 
>> code ;-)
> 
> It's not that I don't think it's important.  I think the *bugs* are 
> important to fix, but that the root cause just *cannot* be fixed.

This completely depends on your definition of "root cause" and "cannot". 
For me, it's the fact that fork will behave in 99.99% of the cases in 
one way and in 0.01% in a different way. That kind of non-determinism is 
probably the root cause for many lingering bugs in our system and it 
*can* be eliminated.

> It's just that:
> 
> 1) the many people who made the same mistake maybe were just 
> cutting'n'pasting buggy code;

That is of course a possibility but unless you think the majority of 
people recognized the bug in the code snippet I posted, I fail to see 
how this makes a difference.

> 2) especially, the fix is not 100% safe unless I'm mistaken.

What do you mean by "100% safe"? It is 100% deterministic (which is what 
I care about); I'm not sure what you mean when you use the term "safe" here.

Cheers,
   - Andreas