So after some experimenting at work I found out what the culprit of my previous post was. I still have no idea why some parts of the code changed, and others didn’t. I imagine that part of that had to do with bad technique (see Scientific Method.) Anyway, it has something to do with the extremely sketchtowne Catalyst::Restarter::Win32. I’m not criticizing Rolsky’s code here, it’s just the nature of using Perl 5 in Windows. Fork is just one of those things that don’t quite work right, so we must resort to hacks.

I recently contributed a little bit of code to the module to fix a small bug I noticed; it looks like I’ll be contributing more.

Also, if you don’t believe me, here’s the way to prove it to yourself that at least something is wrong: open up the process manager or whatever it’s called in windows, and watch the processes, sorted by name. Use the restarter and change a file so that it will restart the dev server. Note that a new process (perl.exe) starts, but the old one never goes away. Do this a few times till it becomes obvious. Then kill the server. Note that the other processes never go away. This seems to be something to do with the “totally hack-tastic” _fork_and_start. It never kills the current process? Or something? I need to do more research and playing around. Hopefully I can get it to stop confusing me.

In other news, if you are on Windows, you probably should not use the Restarter till it gets fixed.