[Twisted-Python] Deferred execution, timeouts, and unhandled exceptions

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Sat, 18 Jan 2003 14:43:00 -0500, Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com> wrote:

> What bothers me most isn't that an exception is being raised, but that it is
> impossible to reasonably catch that exception unless you subclass or
> otherwise do some nasty modifications to the reactor, deferred, or whichever
> class causes the exception.

I believe that I expressed concerns when setTimeout was originally proposed,
noting that only the system firing the callback can reasonably terminate
whatever process is doing the callback.

The meaning of "cancel" is domain-dependant, so if we want a general way of
doing this then we need a way to express cancellation in the code which expects
to be calling the callback.  I think that the system that calls the callback is
usually the one that creates the Deferred, so perhaps we could have an optional
argument to the constructor, cancelCallback.

I can't help but feel this is a really ugly corner case, which would be
inconvenient to effectively force everyone who uses a Deferred to implement in
order for setTimeout to be callable. However, I don't have any better ideas.
My original plan here was to always put timeouts somewhere else besides a
Deferred, and have the system that calls the deferred call an errback at that
point (such as with the "timeout" argument to connectTCP).

Another interesting case: what if two people call setTimeout on the same
Deferred?  If it's not purely the creator's responsibility to set the timeout
on a Deferred, then what do we do about conflicts between different points in
the processing chain?

-- 
 |    <`'>    |  Glyph Lefkowitz: Travelling Sorcerer  |
 |   < _/ >   |  Lead Developer,  the Twisted project  |
 |  < ___/ >  |      http://www.twistedmatrix.com      |
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