Monkey Patch CHEF-2684 causes popen4 to randomly fail on ruby 1.8

Seth Chisamore added a comment - 04/Nov/11 1:56 PM Short answer I think we can just remove the call to 'pid' in the block.call: https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks/blob/master/windows/libraries/ruby_19_patches.rb#L16 Please try this and see if it fixes the problem. Long answer The patch file name may be misnamed. Basically this is fixing a bug in Chef 0.10.4's shelling out/forking logic: Chef 0.10.4 currently has two ways to 'shell out': Chef::Mixin::Command::Windows and Chef::ShellOut::Windows . Both were using different approaches to do the actual underlying command execution Open3.popen3 and Open4.popen4 . The win32-open3 gem (which is loaded on Ruby 1.8 only) provides implementations of both Open3 and Open4 . Ruby 1.9 has no implementation of Open3, so Chef::Mixin::Command::Windows was completely borked on Ruby 1.9 systems. Long term this needed to be patched in Chef ( which it was ), but I wanted to ensure users of the new Ruby 1.9 based full-stack MSI wouldn't be out in the dark with the current Chef 0.10.4 release. The ruby_19_patches.rb file represents a back-porting of this patch. We have a few things in flight that will make all of this a non-issue: Chef::ShellOut::Windows was recently completely re-written to use the underlying WindowsAPI: https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/master/chef/lib/chef/shell_out/windows.rb TODO - all calls (throughout the Chef codebase and Opscode cookbooks) to Chef::Mixin::Command will be moved to use Chef::Mixin::ShellOut and the former will be deprecated. Hope this long explanation helps!

Bryan McLellan [Opscode] added a comment - 09/Feb/12 4:20 PM Paul, did you every try Seth's proposed workaround?

jtimberman added a comment - 11/Jul/12 9:46 PM Duplicate of COOK-1033 , which has the latest discussion.