[IPython-user] Killing a hung program

[Fernando Perez]

Joshua C Gilbert wrote:

> The pysh profile is a system shell. Thus, you are competing with bash, for my 
> usage at least. 

well, what I mean by that is that I'm not going to spend _my_ resources into 
hard-core shell support.  There are other directions of ipython's evolution 
which interest me much more.

> I'm interested in ipython becoming a very real competitor to bash (I hate 
> tcsh). Can you list what you see as currently missing?

Signal handling is the big one, so you can background tasks easily.  I'd also 
argue that a shell should be absolutely bullet-proof (I've never seen tcsh 
crash in over 10 years of using it).  Ipython, while fairly stable, certainly 
doesn't come anywhere close to that kind of reliability.  If I tout it as a 
'bash replacement', people would (rightfully) expect near-100% uptime from it, 
which I doubt I can provide.

> 
> I'm a Debian user. What is so non-portable about signal catching in Python? 
> The standard library signal has always worked for me. What am I missing?

Signal handling across operating systems is notoriously finicky.  IPython has 
win32 and osx users as well as in other traditional unices.  There are many 
posts by Tim Peters on the subject of signal handling and platforms, where he 
  states in no uncertain terms that python's signal capabilities aren't 
necessarily ideal across multiple OSes.  It might be that what's there is 
enough though, I simply haven't tried to provide full signal trapping and 
proper handling to see what would break under win32.

Cheers,

f