Working around refcnt assertion failure in perl

[vsespb]

Hello.

Recently I found a problem, looks like perl bug, posted here: RT#122112 (proof of concept code attached).
In short: "refcnt: fd -1 < 0" assertion triggered.
But this is just bug report, and I need to find workaround for old/current perl versions (bug reproducible in 5.12-5.20).

It seems that any workflow like that:

eval {
  local $SIG{ALRM}=sub{die};
  alarm 10;
  # fork child
  # exec in child (exec made in child to separate exec failures from p
+rogram exit code)
};

_might_ be affected, when ALARM triggered. currently this happening in MIME::Lite for us (related code).

Searching for possible solution to execute external program, with ALRM timeout, without risk running into this.

[Corion]

The only idea that I have would be to decouple mail sending from the rest of your program. Write the mail into a database or a file, and then later have a job go through and send these mails, potentially with a more lenient timeout and without fork+exec involved.