@matheusbsbs / matheus-bagliano / commits / 8b44deebaf

Revert "transport-helper, connect: use clean_on_exit to reap children on abnormal exit"

This reverts commit dd3693eb0859274d62feac8047e1d486b3beaf31. The goal of that commit was to avoid zombie child processes hanging around when the parent git process is killed. But it doesn't quite work when the child command is run by the shell: 1. If there is a shell, then we kill and wait for the shell, not the process spawned by the shell. And so the child process, even if it eventually exits, will hang around as a zombie forever. And this is true of most (all?) shells: bash, dash, etc. So we are not really accomplishing our goal in the first place. 2. Not all shells will exit immediately upon receiving a signal. In particular, mksh will wait for its children to exit (but not actually propagate the signal to them!) leaving us with a potential deadlock: git is wait()ing on mksh, which is wait()ing on a child process, but that child process is waiting on git to produce more input (or EOF) over a pipe. You can see several examples of this deadlock in the test suite, for example by running: make SHELL_PATH=/bin/mksh cd t ./t5702-protocol-v2.sh Because this is a regression for mksh users, and because we did not achieve our goal even with other shells, let's revert the commit for now. If there is a more clever way of doing the same thing, we can consider applying it separately on top (or do nothing and just accept the zombies and rely on PID 1 to reap them). Reported-by: Jan Palus <jpalus@fastmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

Jeff King committed Apr 22, 2026 at 19:00 UTC 8b44deebaf02246b40c267c06bf0c74ef71df292

2 files changed -6

connect.c

-4

@@ -1054,8 +1054,6 @@ static struct child_process *git_proxy_connect(int fd[2], char *host)

1054 strvec_push(&proxy->args, port);

1055 proxy->in = -1;

1056 proxy->out = -1;

1057 - proxy->clean_on_exit = 1;

1058 - proxy->wait_after_clean = 1;

1057 if (start_command(proxy))

1058 die(_("cannot start proxy %s"), git_proxy_command);

1059 fd[0] = proxy->out; /* read from proxy stdout */

@@ -1517,8 +1515,6 @@ struct child_process *git_connect(int fd[2], const char *url,

1515 }

1516 strvec_push(&conn->args, cmd.buf);

1517

1520 - conn->clean_on_exit = 1;

1521 - conn->wait_after_clean = 1;

1518 if (start_command(conn))

1519 die(_("unable to fork"));

1520

transport-helper.c

-2

@@ -154,8 +154,6 @@ static struct child_process *get_helper(struct transport *transport)

154

155 helper->trace2_child_class = helper->args.v[0]; /* "remote-<name>" */

156

157 - helper->clean_on_exit = 1;

158 - helper->wait_after_clean = 1;

157 code = start_command(helper);

158 if (code < 0 && errno == ENOENT)

159 die(_("unable to find remote helper for '%s'"), data->name);