[Python-Dev] Add an optional timeout to lock operations

[Guido van Rossum]

I think I can answer the "why" question: thread.c is *very* old code,
in fact it predates the posix threads standard. When we (actually
Sjoerd Mullender) wrote it, we had a number of OS-specific locking
APIs to work with and the API was designed to fit all of them. I don't
even recall the initial set, but I think it included SGI Irix and and
old version of SunOS. So then over time new platforms were added, but
adding a new method or parameter to the API was nearly impossible
because someone would have to find out how to implement the new
feature on all supported platforms. I think the number of platforms
has dwindled to two or three (Posix, Windows, and maybe one minority
OS?), so now's the time to do it. (IOW I think the idea of the patch
is fine.)

Will locks be interruptible with ^C? That is an oft-requested feature
which also wasn't supported at that time; what's the situation
nowadays?

--Guido

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:46 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I've submitted a patch (*) to add an optional timeout to locking operations
> (Lock.acquire() etc.). Since it's a pretty basic functionality, I would like to
> know if there was any good reason for not doing it.
>
> (*) http://bugs.python.org/issue7316
>
> Thank you
>
> Antoine.
>
>
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)