[Python-3000] About "daemon" in threading module

[Jesse Noller]

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 10:38 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jesse Noller wrote:
>> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Jesus Cea <jcea at jcea.es> wrote:
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>>> Nick Coghlan wrote:
>>>> Hmm, having (daemon=False) as a parameter on start() would probably be
>>>> an even better API than having it on __init__() (modulo subclassing
>>>> compatibility concerns).
>>> Agreed. Could it be done for 3.0?.
>>
>> Also, FWIW, I thought we were no longer doing API changes?
>
> We aren't - if we'd thought of it a month ago, we could have included
> it, but now 2.7/3.1 is the earliest for that change.
>
> As far as the 'typo protection' goes... I'm still not convinced that the
> delayed action of the set daemon effect means that the Thread object
> needs special protection.
>
> If an application fails to set the attribute properly, then its test
> suite will hang on shutdown (as the threading module attempts to do
> .join() on a thread that hasn't been told to stop).

I happen to really like like the property-approach. It makes sense to
call thread.daemon = True, it's also clean and feels natural now that
it's there. And you're right - typos in this will bite people fairly
quickly, but to Jesus' point - those people may go chasing something
else before noticing they typed deamon instead of daemon.

-jesse