Will python ever have signalhandlers in threads?

[Michael Hudson]

I'm not really reading comp.lang.python at the moment, but found this
thread via the Python-URL...

Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> writes:

> The only currently active contributor I can think of who cares about
> signals enough to actually work on them is Michael Hudson, but his
> interest seems limited to keeping the interactions been Python's GNU
> readline wrapper and signals working across incompatible details of
> signal semantics on Unixish boxes.  It's possible I'm wrong, and he'd
> really love to work much more on signals, but feels inhibited by
> Guido's well-known dislike of the beasts.

I think you're more or less right.  A couple of years ago I got pretty
badly discouraged attempting to support sigprocmask and friends from
Python, and came to conclusion that noone who cares about portability
-- not just no Python programmers, but *noone at all* -- mixes threads
and signals, because the cross platform behaviour is a total mess, and
in many cases is just plain buggy (I believe the FreeBSD version of
libc_r for 5.something contains a fix that is a direct consequence of
my efforts, for example).  Even linking with the threading libraries
was enough to stuff things up mightily in some circumstances.

We Do Not Want To Go There.

Cheers,
mwh

-- 
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