[Twisted-Python] Async-pep (again)

Tim Allen screwtape at froup.com
Thu Jul 14 02:48:37 EDT 2011


On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 02:03:03PM +0200, Laurens Van Houtven wrote:
> So, some of you might remember my async-pep post a while ago. Some people
> correctly complained there was no code or text. There's some code and quite
> a bit of text now. In fact, it even has a PEP number (3153)! So I'm
> soliciting feedback again.

The idea of Protocols implementing Transports is vaguely gestured at as
a Useful Thing, but not much detail is given. I think it would be useful
for the final PEP to address that topic more rigorously - partially
because it's good to have a firm basis on which to model SOCKS and SSH
libraries, but mostly because figuring out how SSL should interact with
TCP is going to give people headaches. Twisted, so far as I can see,
just sort of punts and says "Yeah, SSL is just another transport like
TCP", but then you have to make the SSL transport support all the same
options that the TCP transport supports (socket options? IPv6?), but
then what if you want to run SSL over a serial port or a SOCKS
connection... AAAAAAAAAAAAA!

In practice, it might be simpler because "SSL" means "whatever subset of
TCP functionality we can coax OpenSSL into providing" rather than
a fully stackable protocol-providing-a-transport.

The thing with Consumers and Producers seems... very abstract. If I'm
sitting down to retrieve email via POP3 (to pick a random protocol),
'transports' and 'protocols' are tools that nestle very comfortably in
my mental model of the task in front of me; "consumers" and "producers"
are not. Are they concepts that should be handled by transport
implementors? Protocol implementors? Protocol users? Should they be
mapped onto XON/XOFF or RTS/CTS by serial transports?

At least in Twisted, transports and protocols do not exist in a vacuum;
they have to be hooked up via the reactor. Will this PEP define
a (skeletal) API to be implemented by potential reactors, or is that
going to left entirely unspecified, like WSGI?



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