When running windows native version inside non-standard terminal, bzr appears to hang

Bug #69851 reported by Nicholas Allen
10
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Bazaar
Fix Released
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

If you run the native windows client inside a cygwin prompt using rxvt or gnome-terminal, then the bzr break-lock command appears to hang. This is because the user does not see any output on the terminal and does not realise they are being asked a question that they need to respond to. This may be the case with other interactive commands too. Running it inside a DOS prompt the user sees the question bzr is asking and so there is no problem.

Note that in general output seems to be displayed on the terminal even inside a cygwin prompt. It only seems to be when the user is prompted for input that the question is not displayed. Could this be due to different flush policies in cygwin and dos prompt? Perhaps Cygwin only flushes output when a \n character is output.

Tags: cygwin
Revision history for this message
Alexander Belchenko (bialix) wrote : Re: [Bug 69851] When running windows native version inside cygwin, bzr appears to hang

Nicholas Allen пишет:
> Public bug reported:
>
> If you run the native windows client inside a cygwin prompt then the bzr
> break-lock command appears to hang. This is because the user does not
> see any output on the terminal and does not realise they are being asked
> a question that they need to respond to. This may be the case with other
> interactive commands too. Running it inside a DOS prompt the user sees
> the question bzr is asking and so there is no problem.
>
> Note that in general output seems to be displayed on the terminal even
> inside a cygwin prompt. It only seems to be when the user is prompted
> for input that the question is not displayed. Could this be due to
> different flush policies in cygwin and dos prompt? Perhaps Cygwin only
> flushes output when a \n character is output.

I cannot reproduce this bug in cygwin bash shell + standalone bzr.exe
0.12 installed. Break-lock command works OK in this combination.

--
Alexander

Revision history for this message
John A Meinel (jameinel) wrote :

I updated the description a little bit to indicate it isn't just a cygwin shell, but it needs to be a non-standard terminal. Like gnome-terminal or rxvt.

I think Alexander found the right cause when he said that 'raw_input()' is tied directly to the console, rather than going through stdin/stdout.

Sort of like direct terminal access that ssh uses to ask you for your password, which is probably done for both security and so you can do: "ssh foo cat file | grep x" and still have it prompt you for your password.

I'm not sure what bzr should do. Most questions are benign and we could just use regular reading from stdin. But there are occasions where we are asking for a password.

description: updated
Martin Pool (mbp)
Changed in bzr:
importance: Undecided → Medium
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Alexander Belchenko (bialix) wrote :

native windows bzr.exe is not designed to work on non-standard terminal. on Cygwin please use cygwin bzr version.

Changed in bzr:
status: Confirmed → Won't Fix
Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)
Changed in bzr:
status: Won't Fix → Fix Released
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