[slime-devel] Shutting down Swank within an Image.

[Andrew Myers]

As data point I can reliably restart images in which I've executed this form:

(setf *restart-init-function*
               (lambda ()
                 (dolist (connection swank::*connections*)
                   (format t "closing ~a~%" connection)
                   (swank::close-connection connection nil nil))))

Without that the reliability ranges from "works most of the time" to
"never ever works" depending on the OS I'm testing on.  This solution
uses a number of non exported swank features and I'm still not sure if
it's the right direction to go.  Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Andrew

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 8:56 AM, Andrew Myers <asm198 at gmail.com> wrote:
> So I've been looking into the problem of restarting a lisp image saved
> from Slime.  It appears to me that Swank is still blocked on the
> socket listening for connections in the restarted image in some cases
> (I'm not sure why it's inconsistent).   As a result when the image is
> restarted it's stuck listening on a connection that will never receive
> data and can't execute the Swank initialization process to connect to
> the new socket which Slime has chosen.
>
> I was thinking that I would implement swank-backend:save-image to
> shutdown Swank before dumping the image (or possibly have the restart
> function shutdown any existing Swank processes) so there's nothing in
> the way of Swank being re-initialized when the image is loaded again.
> (Does this sounds like a reasonable thing to do?) I'm not sure how to
> do this though, there only seem to be methods for shutting down the
> Swank server, not individual connections.  Looking at other
> implementations of save-image wasn't very illuminating so I seem to be
> missing something.
>
> It looks like the connection struct and the *connections* defvar might
> have what I need in it, but there is only sanctioned access to the
> most recently opened connection via `default-connection`.  Presumably
> I would need to close _all_ *connections*?
>
> Can anyone point me in the right direction?
>
> Thanks,
> Andrew
>