[Telepathy] telepathy-glib: *_run_* methods.

[Alban Crequy]

Le Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:43:02 +0100,
Xavier Claessens <xclaesse at gmail.com> a écrit :

> Hello,

Synchronous calls with *_run_* has generated some bugs in Empathy:

> Some problems with *_run_*:
> 1) If used inside a dbus signal callback, your mainloop get blocked
> and you'll never receive your reply.
> 2) If used inside a dbus method implementation you get the same as in
> 1. 3) It looks like sync call but it is really not, so you have to be
> really careful.
> 4) If you make too much run calls you'll get a really big call stack.
> This is not efficient and makes crash debug more difficult.

I remember some bugs with huge stack.

> 5) gtk_quit() won't work while waiting for a reply, you'll have to
> wait for all calls to return before your program exit. If new calls
> are made after gtk_quit(), you'll have to wait for them to return
> too. If you are in the case 1 or 2, your program will even *never*
> quit.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=532737
(cannot quit the program)

> IMO run API should be avoided. It only makes easier to write quick
> test code, but real sync (blocking calls) is even easier and safer in
> that case.

I agree, synchronous calls are useful to write quick code, but it is
difficult to get it right.

Alban

> Xavier Claessens.
> 
> Le mardi 18 novembre 2008 à 11:08 +0100, Murray Cumming a écrit :
> > It's been suggested that people should just never use the run
> > functions such as tp_cli_connection_run_request_handles(), because
> > these are really asynchronous operations.
> > http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/doc/telepathy-glib/telepathy-glib-connection.html#tp-cli-connection-run-request-handles
> > 
> > However, these functions won't block the main mainloop, right. For
> > instance, they won't prevent a GTK+ application from responding to
> > button clicks. Or am I wrong?
> > 
> > And if you supply a secondary mainloop then you can cancel a run
> > function if some user input makes that necessary.
> > 
> > So the use of these functions really doesn't seem that awful. If you
> > really know that there's nothing else you need to do while waiting,
> > other than responding to user input, then they seem like a sensible
> > way to simplify your code.
> > 
> > The only problem I can see is that the run functions make it
> > difficult to make various requests to telepathy in parallel, but
> > how common is that?
> > 
> > Opinions?
> > 
> 
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