burke/zeus — pull request #272 by antifuchs (2013-03-03 05:18:31+00:00)
Title: Better subprocess handling

This addresses #252 and another issue where the zeus slave would leave zombie runner processes around (one per command ever having been run, until a restart happened).

I'm pretty confident that the fix for #252 is what we want.

The parent commit of that (waiting for runner processes) should also be desirable, but the technique it uses trades off implementation simplicity for precision: While this no longer leaves around O(times a command was run) zombies around, it now leaves around 1 zombie per distinct command per slave (because it reaps only after a new command was read from the command pipe). I'm pretty sure this is still better than what was there before, but would love a suggestion for a better technique that preserves the simplicity of that command loop and ends up working better than this fix (-: