Re: MC no longer working with cygwin 3.1.x

[Ken Brown <kbrown at cornell dot edu>]

On 12/18/2019 2:32 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Dec 18 17:23, Marco Atzeri wrote:
>> Am 18.12.2019 um 15:42 schrieb Laurent R:
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> After the update to cygwin-3.1.1, mc (aka Midnight Commander) no longer starts. It goes into an infinite loop, if I go back to cygwin-3.0.7, mc works perfectly.
>>>
>>> I tested with cygwin-3.1.0, same problem.
>>>
>>> The MC version is 4.8.23 and the operating system is Windows 10 Pro x64 1903.
>>>
>>> Regards.
>>>
>>
>> confirmed
>>
>> there must be a race somewhere as running /usr/bin/mc.exe from strace
>> works fine.
> 
> But that's not the only problem running mc AFAICS.  I'm seeing an
> error message in the background:
> 
> Cannot open named pipe /tmp/mc-corinna/mc.pipe.384
>    /cygdrive/d/cyg_pub/devel/mc/mc-4.8.23-1.x86_64/src/mc-4.8.23/src/subshell/common.c: open: Permission denied
> 
> It looks like there's another problem, this time with the new FIFO
> code.
> 
> Ken, care to take a look?

I've just looked at the mc source code, and it seems that (under tcsh only), mc 
creates a fifo and tries to open it twice as O_RDWR.  This is not supported on 
Cygwin, so the second attempt fails.

Here's the relevant code from src/subshell/common.c:

         if (mc_global.shell->type == SHELL_TCSH)
         {
             g_snprintf (tcsh_fifo, sizeof (tcsh_fifo), "%s/mc.pipe.%d",
                         mc_tmpdir (), (int) getpid ());
             if (mkfifo (tcsh_fifo, 0600) == -1)
             [...]
             /* Opening the FIFO as O_RDONLY or O_WRONLY causes deadlock */

             if ((subshell_pipe[READ] = open (tcsh_fifo, O_RDWR)) == -1
                 || (subshell_pipe[WRITE] = open (tcsh_fifo, O_RDWR)) == -1)
             {
                 fprintf (stderr, _("Cannot open named pipe %s\n"), tcsh_fifo);
                 perror (__FILE__ ": open");
                 mc_global.tty.use_subshell = FALSE;
                 [...]

Under bash, zsh, and some other shells, mc uses ordinary pipes rather than 
FIFOs.  I have no idea why tcsh is treated differently.

Until someone[*] gets around to making it possible to open a FIFO twice for 
reading, I don't think there's anything we can do about it.  I also don't know 
how important this is for mc.  I don't use tcsh or mc, so I can't judge.

Ken

[*] I will probably look into this at some point if there's enough demand for 
it, but I'd like the new FIFO code to get lots of testing first.

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