The original idea was to avoid doing cursor and connection resources
cleanup (left by old and dead threads) synchronously every time
_connection() and/or _cursor() is accessed. This strategy also had
a huge drawback: with no activity on the object, resources were
left hanging there forever.
This commit introduces a better strategy for transparent and automatic
cleanup of resources belonging to terminated threads: every time a new
thread_id arrives at _cursor() or _connection(), a new daemon thread
starts and synchronizes with the caller through a simple Thread.join()
(because it's a daemon thread, we can join() daemon threads as well,
even if this is not really compliant with the specs, but it seems to work
just fine in Python).
When the caller thread is joined, it is possible to start the resources
cleanup procedure, carefully taking into account that thread_ids are
recycled and thus there might be clashing with newly created threads.
This helped a design issue to emerge from the sand (like a zombie
at the seaside): it is impossible to cleanup resources left by the
MainThread because this thread never ends living, and if it dies,
everything dies, obviously. So, the first implementation of this new
strategy was NOT touching the MainThread resources but then, the old
behaviour was to kill them as well on EntropyRepository.close().
So, the final version of this patch kept the old buggy behaviour of
touching MainThread stuff (nein, nein, nein, nein would Hitler say).
However, a new keyword argument "safe" has been added to the close()
method so it is possible to start migrating code to the dark side of the
power.
This means nothing really changed for API consumers yet, just entropy.db.sql
code being more efficient (no weird for loops and synchronous crap)
and actually faster (multi-threading ftw).
1b10177640