butcher_process 0.1.0

Process-tree lifetime and kill primitives, so a consumer can take the process abstraction without the mutation engine.

butcher_process

Process-tree lifetime and kill primitives, split out of the butcher mutation engine so a consumer can take the process abstraction without taking the engine.

The engine spawns real test suites, and those suites spawn their own children. Bounding such a run means ending a whole tree, not one process, and doing it the same way on every platform butcher runs on. That is what this package owns.

What it gives you

Surface	What it does
ProcessInterlock	Owns the spawn, so the started process is a kill boundary; a job object on Windows, a process group on POSIX.
SupervisedProcess	One process tree with one owner: streams, a deadline, an idempotent kill.
terminateAllSupervisedProcesses	Reaps every live tree, so a signal handler needs no handle on a worker pool.
hostProcessCount	A diagnostic count of live processes on the host, never a kill path.

final process = await SupervisedProcess.start('dart', ['test']);
final code = await process.wait(deadline: const Duration(minutes: 10));
if (code == null) print('the tree was killed on its deadline');

Limits

• A descendant that creates a session of its own leaves the group and survives the kill. Such a process is reparented to pid 1, so it is unreachable from a process listing too.
• On POSIX the group is entered by an exec-in-place shim: setsid where it exists, otherwise perl. Without either, the kill reaches only the started process and says so once, loudly.

License

MIT, derived from the upstream radioactive_dart package — see LICENSE.