Should I just go ahead and attach my branch to this ticket?
It's up to date with my current work, which mostly works pretty well except for three major issues that I'm aware of:
1) The weirdness with hanging during GAP initialization if there is an existing workspace. This might have something to do with the issue Markus has mentioned w.r.t. spawning a shell (??) for some reason. I'm going to look into that next since I consider it the most severe issue for getting something usable. I'm sure I can figure it out quickly; I just haven't investigated it at all yet.
2) General issues regarding signal handling. The situation there mostly isn't great--I found some cases where even GAP's eval loop can't be interrupted. I agree with Jeroen that ideally that's "not acceptable", but I believe we may need to compromise in the near term (and the situation isn't all that better in current Sage either).
3) The Panic
issue. I've confirmed that affects current Sage as well. I believe Markus has made some comment to suggest he's thinking about that (among other related issues) so we may have a solution at some point (I think the obvious one, at least broadly speaking, is just having a hook for what Panic
actually does). But I'm not going to worry about that for the purposes of GAP 4.10 integration since it's at least not a regression.