[Distutils] Installing packages using pip

[R. David Murray]

On Tue, 08 Dec 2015 08:56:49 +0200, contact at ionelmc.ro wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 6:25 PM, Marius Gedminas <marius at gedmin.as> wrote:
> 
> > What you can do Linux that you cannot do on Windows is delete a shared
> > library file while it's mapped into a process's address space.  Then
> > Linux lets you create a new file with the same name, while the old file
> > stays around, nameless, until it's no longer used, at which point the
> > disk space gets garbage-collected.  (If we can call reference counting
> > "garbage collection".)
> >
> > The result is as you said: existing processes keep running the old code
> > until you restart them.  There are tools (based on lsof, AFAIU) that
> > check for this situation and remind you to restart daemons.
> >
> 
> Not sure what exactly was going on but whenever I did that on linux I got
> the most peculiar segfaults and failures. It is certainly not a safe thing
> to do, even if linux lets you do it.

I'm not sure what you did, because to my understanding it certainly
should be safe on linux, at least on posix compliant file systems.

--David