> I may be missing something here but isn't the whole point of EINTR to
> interrupt a potentially long running syscall?

Not exactly. The point is to signal (!) that a signal was received.
The received signal is not necessarily expected.

Also, from what I understand, it is more reliable to use a wakeup fd
(using e.g. signal.set_wakeup_fd) rather than expect EINTR to be
returned:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2013-August/128204.html