A lock that times out but doesn't poll

[Jive]

"Peter Hansen" <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message
news:cocmon$k3c$1 at utornnr1pp.grouptelecom.net...
> Python, of course, is unsuitable for many hard realtime systems,
> and if you're using Windows you are probably on the wrong platform
> in the first place.

Well, there is that.  The platform I'm using is a realtime operating system,
but it has a Windoze lookalike
API for OS functions like threads, semaphores, critical sections, events,
and whatnot.

[OT]
 I don't draw any distinction between "soft" and "hard" realtime. I've never
seen definitions for
those terms that I thought  were useful.  If some operations must be
performed within a certain time
window, to me that's realtime, neither hard, soft, smooth, lumpy, or just
right.  A realtime operating
system has guaranteed latency. Depending on the application, it does not
necessarily have
to be fast.  I have an application that runs fine on a realtime OS, but
fails eventually under MS Windows
running on a processor that's 3x as fast.
[/OT]

> The bar for putting things in the main distribution should be
> very, very high.

Agreed.  IMHO the bar was not set high enough for the current threading
module.

> One of the conditions for doing that should
> probably be that the code is fairly widely used and widely
> required.

Why?  If the existing code could be better, why not improve it?

>
> Why not post it to an appropriate "recipe" page in the fledgling
> Agile Control Forum site instead?  (http://www.engcorp.com/acf)
> That way others who *do* work in the machine control field will
> have an early chance to try out your code, experiment, maybe
> even improve it, fix bugs,

Oh, there will be no bugs.

> and basically do some of the work that
> *should* be done before anything gets into the main Python distro...
>

I will give it a look.  I had some spare time last year when I volunteered
the first
time.  I don't have spare time now, and probably will not have before May at
the earliest..
If someone would like to take over the code, I would be happy to contribute
it and give
as much help as I can.

Jive