Re: how to set timeout / signal

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Thien-Thi Nguyen <address@hidden> skribis:

> () address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès)
> () Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:51:14 +0100
>
>    Yes, add ‘meta.timeout’ and/or ‘meta.maxSilent’ fields like this:
>    [...]
>    The ‘meta.timeout’ field is for an absolute timeout, so use with care.
>
> Thanks.  Is meta.foo documentation available somewhere on the net?

There’s the Nixpkgs manual at
<http://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixpkgs/trunk/tarball/latest/download/2/manual.html#chap-meta>,
but it doesn’t mention these two (yet.)  They correspond to the
‘--timeout’ and ‘--max-silent-time’ options of ‘nix-store’ described in
the Nix manual
<http://hydra.nixos.org/job/nix/trunk/tarball/latest/download/1/manual.html#sec-common-options>.

> Perhaps we can scrape together a simple HOWTO and add it to the repo.
>
>    > Also, IWBN to be able to configure a signal to send prior to the
>    > (presumed) SIGKILL.
>
>    That’s not currently possible.  Why would you want that?
>
> To be able to set a handler that dumps state, or run a quick gdb
> script (for same).

What about doing using, say, timeout(1) from Coreutils, and backtrace(3)
from libc?

Thanks,
Ludo’.