[Python-Dev] Polling with Pending Calls?

[Tony Nelson]

I think I have a need to handle *nix signals through polling in a library.
It looks like chaining Pending Calls is almost the way to do it, but I see
that doing so would make the interpreter edgy.

The RPM library takes (steals) the signal handling away from its client
application.  It has good reason to be so paranoid, but it breaks the
handling keyboard interrupts, especially if rpmlib is used in the normal
way:  opened at the beginning, various things are done by the app, closed
at the end.  If there is an extended period in the middle where no calls
are made to rpmlib (say, in yum during the downloading of packages or
package headers), then responst to a keyboard interrupt can be delayed for
/minutes/!  Yum is presently doing something awful to work around that
issue.

It is possible to poll rpmlib to find if there is a pending keyboard
interrupt.  Client applications could have such polls sprinkled throughout
them.  I think getting yum, for example, to do that might be politically
difficult.  I'm hoping to propose a patch to rpmlib's Python bindings to do
the polling automagically.

Looking at Python's normal signal handling, I see that Py_AddPendingCall()
and Py_MakePendingCalls(), and  PyEvel_EvalFrameEx()'s ticker check are how
signals and other async events are done.  I could imagine making rpmlib's
Python bindings add a Pending Call when the library is loaded (or some
such), and that Pending Call would make a quick check of rpmlib's caught
signals flags and then call Py_AddPendingCall() on itself.  It appears that
this would work, and is almost the expected thing to do, but unfortunately
it would cause the ticker check to think that Py_MakePendingCalls() had
failed and needed to be called again ASAP, which would drastically slow
down the interpreter.

Is there a right way to get the Python interpreter to poll something, or
should I look for another approach?

[I hope this message doesn't spend too many days in the grey list limbo.]
-- 
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TonyN.:'    The Great Writ     <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
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