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Bug: Background doesn't work as expected, should be deprecated and eventually removed

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#332 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
28/100
Issue type
Refactor
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
ruby, shell
Domain
devops

Research direction

Start at lib/sshkit/backends/abstract.rb#L59 and inspect how the background DSL method invokes nohup and shell job control. Search the repository for background callers and related tests or documentation; done means the agreed deprecation or removal scope is reflected consistently across the DSL and its uses.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

discuss!

https://github.com/capistrano/sshkit/blob/6c81f53eec86443ea4f03fd87ae3350d4d4051ec/lib/sshkit/backends/abstract.rb#L59

The problem is that background simply nohup and backgrounds the process using the shell's job control &. More often than not, badly behaved daemons still block.

There's many hoops to jump through to ensure that your process behaves well when backgrounded, forked, nohupped, etc - and we can't whitelist programs that do it well, and blacklist those that can't.

Discussion is welcome, but I do think that background() should be removed from the DSL.

Dominant language
Ruby
Stars
1.2k
Forks
257
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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