| msg192500 - (view) |
Author: Chris Siebenmann (cks) |
Date: 2013-07-06 23:33 |
| socket.fromfd() requires you to supply at least the family and type of the file descriptor that you are turning into a Python socket object. However the socket module provides no documented way to determine what these actually are and there are any number of situations where you may get handed file descriptors with an indeterminate type. Nor does providing incorrect family and type values raise an exception from fromfd(), although if you get the wrong values you may get exceptions from calling methods on the returned socket (you can also get garbled and nonsensical results from some methods). (For instance, in Python 3 calling .getsockname() may raise UnicodeDecodeError under some circumstances.) Suggested resolution: socket.fromfd() should always determine the family and type itself and the arguments for them should become optional. If they are supplied and they do not match the determined family and type, fromfd() should probably raise an exception (although that will break some existing code). Less appealing resolution: the socket module should provide officially documented and supported methods for determining the family and type of a (socket) file descriptor. I think that a new module function to do this would be the cleanest approach. |
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| msg192501 - (view) |
Author: Christian Heimes (christian.heimes) *  |
Date: 2013-07-07 00:01 |
| Unfortunately it's not as easy as you may think. BSD sockets have no portable API to retrieve domain, type and protocol from a file descriptor. getsockopt() may be able to retrieve some or even all values but it's not portable. For example SO_DOMAIN and SO_PROTOCOL requires Linux 2.6.32 or newer. I'm not sure about BSD or Windows. It's also not possible to verify the parameters until you actually do an operation like send(), recv() or accept() on a fd. Wrong parameters may not raise an error after all. For now I suggest that you pass all information to the other process, that is fd, domain, type, proto. They are just integers. |
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| msg192510 - (view) |
Author: Chris Siebenmann (cks) |
Date: 2013-07-07 03:04 |
| As far as I know, you can recover everything except the protocol portably on Unix (and fromfd() will already handwave the protocol). getsockopt() with SO_TYPE will give you the type. The family can be recovered by calling getsockname() with a plain struct sockaddr and then examining sockaddr.sa_family. As for the other suggestion: When Python is plugging into larger systems or APIs that pass sockets around, it is not possible to modify those APIs to pass the additional information that Python wants (and other environments don't need). As far as I know, no current protocol that passes file descriptors to newly started programs or passes file descriptors over Unix sockets with sendmsg() and SCM_RIGHTS does this. The people responsible for these protocols are not likely to change them to accommodate Python's wants. A Python program (and thus Python programmers) get to deal with the issue themselves if they want Python to participate in these systems and protocols. I do want to be able to write Python programs that can interact in these environments. It is possible to deal with this in C; it is even possible to hack around this in Python today. I believe that it should be officially supported. |
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| msg192667 - (view) |
Author: Glyph Lefkowitz (glyph)  |
Date: 2013-07-08 16:40 |
| It would be nice for this to be fixed in a 2.7.x release too, if possible, since the workaround involves a ton of extra system calls and there's no other way to construct a socket object directly. |
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| msg203183 - (view) |
Author: Christian Heimes (christian.heimes) * |
Date: 2013-11-17 14:43 |
| Do you want to work on a patch for 3.4? You have about five days until 3.4 is going into feature freeze. |
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| msg264650 - (view) |
Author: Christian Heimes (christian.heimes) * |
Date: 2016-05-02 14:31 |
| fromfd() can be simplified after #26907 has landed. |
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| msg269198 - (view) |
Author: Neil Schemenauer (nascheme) * |
Date: 2016-06-24 17:20 |
| I've created a patch to add fromfd2(). I think it addresses the original concern of this issue. My patch also adds the constants suggested by Issue #26907. |
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| msg269199 - (view) |
Author: Neil Schemenauer (nascheme) * |
Date: 2016-06-24 17:22 |
| Sorry, forgot to link the patch: Issue #27377. |
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