Subject: Re: [bug#36668] [PATCH 0/1] Add 'eval/container'

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2019 17:51:21 +0200

Hello!

"Thompson, David" <[email-masked]> skribis:

> On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 10:22 AM Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> wrote:

[...]

>> I wonder if we should target ‘run-in-container’ instead of
>> ‘call-with-container’, or maybe both.
>
> I am behind the times. What is special about 'run-in-container'?

I actually meant ‘run-container’, which is the lower-level procedure
that ‘call-with-container’ invokes: it returns the PID of the process
that has been created.

>> It’s also a bit troubling
>> that ‘eval/container’ returns an exit status instead of the evaluation
>> result, but I think it has to be this way, more or less.
>
> I haven't looked at your code, but have you considered supporting
> return values that can be serialized via 'write' and then using 'read'
> on the host side?  (Hmm, I wonder how exceptions could be passed from
> container to host.)

I did that in ‘container-excursion*’ a while back, but it’s not
generally applicable (there needs to be a read syntax for what’s sent),
and I think it might be better to build it on top of a more primitive
procedure like this ‘eval/container’.

Whether we need something like this will depend on use cases I guess…

Thanks for your feedback!

Ludo’.