Re: [boost] [GSoC] Some Ideas about the Boost.Process

Subject: Re: [boost] [GSoC] Some Ideas about the Boost.Process
From: Felipe Tanus (fotanus_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-03-24 20:36:19

Hi Schaeling, thanks for your answer.

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Boris Schaeling <boris_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> [...] In fact there has
> been a Boost.Process draft from Ilya Sokolov in 2008 without Windows and
> POSIX types and functions [...]. He later said
> though that he thinks that removing those types and functions was an error
> [...]
> Unfortunately I didn't ask him at that time why he thinks it was an error
> (probably because it didn't seem to make sense to me at that time either). [...]

    I'll try to contact he and hope to he remembers; This should be
the most dedicated matter, so I would not like to do any proposals
involving this without knowing why remove this API specific classes
would be an error.

> I also think we can get rid of the Executable concept which currently must
> be a std::string anyway.

       I agree. In future would not be hard re-enable this concept if
needed, differently from the number 1.

>
> Here the problem is that on Windows only named pipes support asynchronous
> I/O. [..] If we distinguish between anonymous and named pipes anyway
> we could provide appropriate classes which could be used by developers
> elsewhere. [...]. If we want to support asynchronous I/O on Windows we have to
> think about all of this.

       I don't have a final idea about this yet, but I'm quite sure we
can bypass it. One way to do this, would define two helpers
create_named_pipe and create_anonymous_pipe. In the POSIX asynchronous
implementation it can receive any pipe, and in Windows only
named_pipes. There is the need of other helper, create_async_pipe, to
create in windows named and in POSIX unnamed, this closing all
combinations. A little tricky, but multiplataform and the user keep
the control about the name of his pipes.

> The unit tests of Ilya's Boost.Process drafts (the one in the vault) are
> pretty good because everything works automatically if I remember correctly [...]

        I'm not sure what issues I was talking about. Sorry for the noise.

-- 
Felipe de Oliveira Tanus
E-mail: fotanus_at_[hidden]
Blog: http://www.itlife.com.br
Site: http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~fotanus/
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"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." - Gandalf