RE: O_NONBLOCK: should I blame git or ssh?

[Douglas Graham <douglas.graham@ericsson.com>]

I think I've just figured out why my workaround works.  When ssh sets O_NONBLOCK
on stdout, it's setting it on the write side of the pipe that git created.  Nothing
else writes to that pipe, so this does not cause a problem.  Presumably, ssh itself
is able to deal with writing to a non-blocking "file description". When ssh sets
O_NONBLOCK on stderr, it's setting it on the pipe created by Jenkins.  But that's
the same pipe that my workaround program does the select() on, so my workaround
can compensate. When I run "make | workaround", the write side of *that* pipe is
never made non-blocking, and that's the one that make itself writes to.

Ok, I think all mysteries are solved, but I'm still not sure what the moral of
the story is. This seems like it could lead to some really difficult to debug
problems, but it's not clear to me what the right long-term fix should be. For
now, we'll just leave our workaround in place and think about tweaking our
makefile to redirect git's stderr.