How to force a thread to stop

[bryanjugglercryptographer at yahoo.com]

Carl J. Van Arsdall wrote:
> Unfortunately this is due to the nature of the problem I am tasked with
> solving.  I have a large computing farm, these os.system calls are often
> things like ssh that do work on locations remote from the initial python
> task.  I suppose eventually I'll end up using a framework like twisted
> but, as with many projects, I got thrown into this thing and threading
> is where we ended up.  So now there's the rush to make things work
> before we can really look at a proper solution.

I don't get what threading and Twisted would to do for
you. The problem you actually have is that you sometimes
need terminate these other process running other programs.
Use spawn, fork/exec* or maybe one of the popens.


> Again, the problem I'm trying to solve doesn't work like this.  I've
> been working on a framework to be run across a large number of
> distributed nodes (here's where you throw out the "duh, use a
> distributed technology" in my face).  The thing is, I'm only writing the
> framework, the framework will work with modules, lots of them, which
> will be written by other people.  Its going to be impossible to get
> people to write hundreds of modules that constantly check for status
> messages.  So, if I want my thread to "give itself up" I have to tell it
> to give up.

Threads have little to do with what you say you need.

[...]
> I feel like this is something we've established multiple times.  Yes, we
> want the thread to kill itself.  Alright, now that we agree on that,
> what is the best way to do that.

Wrong. In your examples, you want to kill other processes. You
can't run external programs such as ssh as Python threads. Ending
a Python thread has essentially nothing to do with it.

> Right now people keep saying we must  send the thread a message.

Not me. I'm saying work the problem you actually have.


-- 
--Bryan