[o11c]

Er, whyever wouldn't it? On Linux it certainly works as expected, and it seems that it works fine on OS X when avoiding the broken Go shims.

[chipaca]

I seem to remember non-blocking io with named pipes was unreliable, in the sense that the test suite of whatever-it-was (memory is reeealy sketchy, this was tens of years ago) would fail randomly often enough that we had to throw the easy solution away and do actual networking.

A bit like the .signature named pipe from fortune thing, where sometimes you got two signatures and sometimes none? Anybody remember that?

[thwarted]

Is this what you're referring to?

signature file can't be a named pipe (or /proc/uptime) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62993

can't attach signature from pipe (fifo) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163831