IPC problems on kFreeBSD: Text mode applications

[Axel Beckert <abe@deuxchevaux.org>]

Hi,

this the first mail as promised in my last mail.

I noticed a bunch of Inter-Process Communication problems on Debian
GNU/kFreeBSD. Some got better, so never changed. Most of them are
about not passing signals to child processes or child processes losing
terminals. Although they may have the 

One of those problems is that many text mode applications loose there
terminal after suspend (Ctrl-Z) and foreground (fg) or in similar
situations.

The worst one is gone in the meanwhile: Formerly after having pressed enter
after interactive install runs with aptitude, aptitude has lost the
connection to the terminal. It's TUI is there, but all pressed keys
went to the underlying bash and only showed up after I killed aptitude
using Ctrl-C.

What's still very annoying is that although Ctrl-Z suspends a process
in a terminal, fg (in bash) doesn't get it back. bash believes there's
no more job running, but the processes are still running.

An example with zile. Any other text-mode application which has
working suspend on Linux or FreeBSD should work, too.

zile
^Z
fg

and you have suddenly a bash prompt in the middle of the terminal
which already switched back to fullscreen text-mode for zile.

You can't get zile back with "fg" again. bash believes there is no
more job running. 

But it is. If you then logout or exit the bash, you get the following
messages to the terminal:

abe@metisse:~$ logout
zile: terminated with signal 1.
Trying to save modified buffers (if any)...

For someone who uses Unix since more than decaded and has internalized
the usage of Ctrl-Z and fg, this is very hard. It's like you should
avoid the "E" key on the keyboard and any time you press it anyway,
someone hits your thumb with a hammer: You'll change your habbits
quite quickly, but it really hurts and if you have been working on
another machine it takes a few blue thumbs until you remember that you
should avoid the "E" key.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
Axel Beckert - abe@deuxchevaux.org, abe@noone.org - http://noone.org/abe/