[ssc-devel] PASS-BARRIER/TIMEOUT is not useful.

[Matthew Astley]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 10:26:20AM +0100, Marco Monteiro wrote:

> I'm currently using pass-barrier/timeout heavily in the test suite.
> Apart from its use there, I can't see any use for it.

Anything that makes testing easier is probably worth keeping, even if
it has no other use.

Could you post a URL for the test code in which it is useful?
Currently I have no application requiring threads[1] so I can only
attempt to contrive another useful case.

The first project on my "to do one day" list that might require
threads probably only needs them because it may be network-bound.

> Unless someone can think of an use for it, I think that it should be
> thrown out.
> 
> Any thoughts?

What is the cost of leaving it in?  Or perhaps in an easier to answer
form: across all likely implementations, what might be the average and
maximum costs of leaving it in?

Alternatively, if you preferred to trim down to a core SSC spec and
then offer an ssc-extra package in some cases, will this impact the
usefulness of the spec?  Is a programmer can't rely on functionality
being present he's back to either rolling his own, pulling in a
library or coding it up for some subset of vendors.


You may see these are generic comments, which might apply to anything
else just as well...

Matthew  #8-)
-- 
[1] apart from serving concurrent but independent HTTP requests: TBNL
does all the work for me, using in turn KMRCL.