Removal of opened port not detected properly.

See https://github.com/Teaduskeskus-AHHAA/oskar_driver/blob/cf0a9f6b7cb7d4382fb9ac8d07a1e08d070df620/src/board_comms.cpp for how I'm using this serial library in ros/ubuntu18.04

I've developed a bit of a problem.. When transmitting, if I remove my serial port.. it will thrown a exception, in which serial_.isOpen will still be true. When I try to manually close, it will complain about calling terminate after a portnotopened exception. As you may see, I have a interval configure to reconnect, since the serial instance will not detect a proper disconnect, that reconnection attempt will not run. Are there any ways to make serial_isOpen properly detect removal of the serial device?

The short answer is "I'm not sure". It has been long enough that I don't know what the expected behavior should be.

I know that in the past, Linux had some issues with hardware disconnects, e.g. read would report ready but the device was actually not connected:

serial/src/impl/unix.cc

Lines 587 to 591 in 33e5a31

    
           // Disconnected devices, at least on Linux, show the 
        
           // behavior that they are always ready to read immediately 
        
           // but reading returns nothing. 
        
           throw SerialException ("device reports readiness to read but " 
        
                                  "returned no data (device disconnected?)");

But I don't know if this is related to your use case. Perhaps you can just catch the exception when you try to close it and keep going? But I'm honestly not sure.

I am running into the same issue on Windows where once a port is disconnected "isOpen" still returns true.

	// Disconnected devices, at least on Linux, show the
	// behavior that they are always ready to read immediately
	// but reading returns nothing.
	throw SerialException ("device reports readiness to read but "
	"returned no data (device disconnected?)");