Merged revisions 74063 via svnmerge from

svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/branches/py3k

NB: the news item for r73708 seems to have inadvertently been included in a
different, unrelated merge set (r74055).  I restored it here.

................
  r74063 | alexandre.vassalotti | 2009-07-17 08:07:01 -0400 (Fri, 17 Jul 2009) | 17 lines

  Merged revisions 73694,73708,73738 via svnmerge from
  svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/trunk

  ........
    r73694 | jesse.noller | 2009-06-29 14:24:26 -0400 (Mon, 29 Jun 2009) | 1 line

    Issue 5740: multiprocessing.connection.* authkey fixes
  ........
    r73708 | jesse.noller | 2009-06-30 13:11:52 -0400 (Tue, 30 Jun 2009) | 1 line

    Resolves issues 5155, 5313, 5331 - bad file descriptor error with processes in processes
  ........
    r73738 | r.david.murray | 2009-06-30 22:49:10 -0400 (Tue, 30 Jun 2009) | 2 lines

    Make punctuation prettier and break up run-on sentence.
  ........
................

1 files changed, 34 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/Doc/library/multiprocessing.rst b/Doc/library/multiprocessing.rst
index d1b22db..d3cfa0a 100644
--- a/Doc/library/multiprocessing.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/multiprocessing.rst
@@ -1713,7 +1713,7 @@ authentication* using the :mod:`hmac` module.
    generally be omitted since it can usually be inferred from the format of
    *address*. (See :ref:`multiprocessing-address-formats`)
 
-   If *authentication* is ``True`` or *authkey* is a string then digest
+   If *authenticate* is ``True`` or *authkey* is a string then digest
    authentication is used.  The key used for authentication will be either
    *authkey* or ``current_process().authkey)`` if *authkey* is ``None``.
    If authentication fails then :exc:`AuthenticationError` is raised.  See
@@ -1755,7 +1755,7 @@ authentication* using the :mod:`hmac` module.
 
    If *authkey* is ``None`` and *authenticate* is ``True`` then
    ``current_process().authkey`` is used as the authentication key.  If
-   *authkey* is ``None`` and *authentication* is ``False`` then no
+   *authkey* is ``None`` and *authenticate* is ``False`` then no
    authentication is done.  If authentication fails then
    :exc:`AuthenticationError` is raised.  See :ref:`multiprocessing-auth-keys`.
 
@@ -2097,6 +2097,38 @@ Explicitly pass resources to child processes
            for i in range(10):
                 Process(target=f, args=(lock,)).start()
 
+Beware replacing sys.stdin with a "file like object"
+
+    :mod:`multiprocessing` originally unconditionally called::
+
+        os.close(sys.stdin.fileno())
+
+    in the :meth:`multiprocessing.Process._bootstrap` method --- this resulted
+    in issues with processes-in-processes. This has been changed to::
+
+        sys.stdin.close()
+        sys.stdin = open(os.devnull)
+
+    Which solves the fundamental issue of processes colliding with each other
+    resulting in a bad file descriptor error, but introduces a potential danger
+    to applications which replace :func:`sys.stdin` with a "file-like object"
+    with output buffering.  This danger is that if multiple processes call
+    :func:`close()` on this file-like object, it could result in the same
+    data being flushed to the object multiple times, resulting in corruption.
+
+    If you write a file-like object and implement your own caching, you can
+    make it fork-safe by storing the pid whenever you append to the cache,
+    and discarding the cache when the pid changes. For example::
+
+       @property
+       def cache(self):
+           pid = os.getpid()
+           if pid != self._pid:
+               self._pid = pid
+               self._cache = []
+           return self._cache
+
+    For more information, see :issue:`5155`, :issue:`5313` and :issue:`5331`
 
 Windows
 ~~~~~~~