Re: RFA: infrun.c: mourn instead of kill after TARGET_WAITKIND_SIGNALLED

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Nick Duffek wrote:
> 
> The appended patch calls target_mourn_inferior() instead of target_kill()
> in response to TARGET_WAITKIND_SIGNALLED in handle_inferior_event().
> 
> This comment precedes the target_kill():
> 
>   /* This looks pretty bogus to me.  Doesn't TARGET_WAITKIND_SIGNALLED
>      mean it is already dead?  This has been here since GDB 2.8, so
>      perhaps it means rms didn't understand unix waitstatuses?
>      For the moment I'm just kludging around this in remote.c
>      rather than trying to change it here --kingdon, 5 Dec 1994.  */
> 
> According to target.h, TARGET_WAITKIND_SIGNALLED does indeed mean that the
> program has terminated, and all current uses of TARGET_WAITKIND_SIGNALLED
> seem to honor that meaning.  Here's where it gets used:

I've always wanted to understand that bit of code, but never got a
chance to really research it, so I don't have any additional info.
Given the antiquity of this bit, it's conceivable that some mid-80s
Unix flavor had a bug where processes weren't quite dead even
though reported as such, and target_kill was just an extra bullet
in the brain, just in case (how graphic).

Let's go with this change, but add a comment to the effect that
this used to be target_kill but nobody knew why, and maybe a bit of
the commentary that you included in your message, so that a future
hacker who discovers why target_kill is necessary won't be quite as
mystified as we are about why the code works as it does.

Stan