Re: [Devel] Close on exec for font files

[Keith Packard]

Around 10 o'clock on Dec 26, Scott Long wrote:

> He's probably spawning worker processes from a process that uses FreeType,
> and his problem is that all of FreeType's open files remain open in the
> child process. It seems like an issue of aesthetics.

As you may know, I use FreeType in every application that I run on my 
desktop; it's a part of X these days.  Most of the applications I use 
don't have any idea that FreeType is involved, the only way I can get the 
files closed would be to add new calls at every level -- some of the APIs 
aren't mine to change, so I'm pretty constrained as to what I can do.

We had similar discussion about the X file descriptors -- applications 
*could* close them after the fork, but there's no possible value to keeping
them open across the exec so it was simpler to just close them 
automatically.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        Compaq Cambridge Research Lab