[gst-devel] library functions not returning

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

Today I was working on robustness of spider/GStreamer on random input
files.

One pipeline triggered an endless loop in the pixbuf loader; I gave it a
.gz file, and the rsvg library implementing a pixbuf loader had an
endless loop on closing the pixbuf loader.

The upstream bug for this is fixed; however, this sort of bug reflects
badly on us since it's not very obvious that this is a bug in a
supporting library.

I was considering using an alarm signal to drop out of the close
function after some time, but I'm sure people will disagree on this. 
OTOH, the alarm will not be triggered anyway in the general case, since
the function is supposed to return properly.  If an alarm is triggered
anyway, something bad already happened.

I am considering setting this up somewhere more general to wrap
functions that we have found to be blocking, so that we at least can
inform the user of the problem.  What do you think ?

Thomas

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