Re: snapshot 20050114 race (on list)

[Christopher Faylor <me at cgf dot cx>]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 08:17:30PM -0500, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
>The more I think about it, the less I see why you don't get rid of it.
>PID_EXITED is a transient state into or out of PID_ZOMBIE.  From a user
>interface point of view, it doesn't matter if PID_EXITED is shown as
>zombie, the result might well be correct one ms earlier or later.
>Internally Cygwin doesn't care either, except in one spot in sigproc.cc
>(see original mail in thread).  But even there merging the states won't
>hurt.

Zombie isn't a cygwin invention, though.  Something could be displayed as
a zombie that would never actually be a zombie.

It's funny but one of the things that kept me putting this back was
arguing this point with you in my head.  I guess my Pierre Humblet
simulator isn't too good because I thought you'd be arguing that zombie
should maintain the meaning that it has had previously in cygwin and in
UNIX.

I guess I'll think about this some more.  If not for the transient state
when a process has a zero exitcode, we could almost use exitcode for
everything.  I've been down that road, too.

cgf