[Python-ideas] Design decisions about socket.sendfile()

[Giampaolo Rodola']

In http://bugs.python.org/issue17552 me and a bunch of other devs are
currently discussing what kind of API socket.sendfile() should have and
because it seems there are different opinions about it I though I should
have brought this up here for further discussion.
With issue 17552 I'm proposing to provide a wrapper on top of
os.sendfile(), socket.send() and possibly TransmitFile on Windows. AFAIK
the modules which could immediately benefit from this addition are ftplib (
http://bugs.python.org/issue13564) and httplib (
http://bugs.python.org/issue13559).

This is the current function signature as of socket-sendfile5.patch:

    def sendfile(self, file, blocksize=262144, offset=0, use_fallback=True):
        """sendfile(file[, blocksize[, offset[, use_fallback]]]) -> sent

        Send a file until EOF is reached attempting to use high-performance
        os.sendfile() in which case *file* must be a regular file object
        opened in binary mode; if not and *use_fallback* is True send()
        will be used instead.
        File position is updated on return or also in case of error in
        which case file.tell() can be used to figure out the number of
        bytes which were transmitted.
        *blocksize* is the maximum number of bytes to transmit at one time,
        *offset* tells from where to start reading the file.
        The socket must be of SOCK_STREAM type.
        Non-blocking sockets are not supported.
        Return the total number of bytes which were transmitted.
        """

Debatable questions which were raised during the discussion on the bug
tracker are:

1 - whether to provide a "use_fallback" argument which when False raises an
exception in case os.sendfile() could not be used

2 - whether to provide a custom exception in order to signal the number of
bytes transmitted as opposed to use file.tell() afterwards; for the record,
I'm -1 on this.

3 - whether to commit the patch as-is without including Windows support via
TransmitFile() and
post-pone that for a later time in a separate issue

4 - (extra) whether to provide a "callback" argument which gets called
against each block of data before it is being sent.  This would be useful
to apply data transformation or to implement a progress bar or something.
 Note if this gets added it would sort of conflict with the
"use_fallback=False" parameter because in order to apply data
transformation socket.send() must be used instead of os.sendfile().

So far #1 appears to be the most debatable question.


-- 
Giampaolo - http://grodola.blogspot.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20140423/09e0653d/attachment.html>