Yeah. This can be a serious issue, for the record. It is difficult for me to come up with an experience that has made me quite as angry as calling urllib.urlopen().read() in a highly-contended program (Apache2 mpm_worker) and getting an EINTR exception bubbled all the way up to the top... I mean, what did they expect I do: retry the entire HTTP fetch? ;P
I finally switched to mpm_event, which caused me to no longer get signals constantly, but until then I was seriously running a patched copy of Python to work around this issue; an issue, by the way, which was reported at the beginning of 2007, and only fixed midway through 2010. :(
The general idea, however, is that if you are using a low-level primitive, one that nigh unto maps directly to a system call (as opposed to urlopen ;P), then you actually "want" (supposedly) EINTR to not be handled for you, as it might be your intention to use it to do something valuable (just as you might from a C program).
I finally switched to mpm_event, which caused me to no longer get signals constantly, but until then I was seriously running a patched copy of Python to work around this issue; an issue, by the way, which was reported at the beginning of 2007, and only fixed midway through 2010. :(
http://bugs.python.org/issue1628205
The general idea, however, is that if you are using a low-level primitive, one that nigh unto maps directly to a system call (as opposed to urlopen ;P), then you actually "want" (supposedly) EINTR to not be handled for you, as it might be your intention to use it to do something valuable (just as you might from a C program).