From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2008-02-06T16:12:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Timeout::Error


From: "Jeremy Thurgood" <jerith@jerith.za.net>
> Eric Hodel wrote:
>> On Feb 5, 2008, at 06:20 AM, Jeremy Thurgood wrote:
>> 
>>> Good day,
>>>
>>> Would it be possible to change the superclass of Timeout::Error to  
>>> something in StandardError?
>> 
>> No.  The exception would be rescued inappropriately then.
> 
> At the moment it's being /not/ rescued inappropriately. Why should a 
> timeout exception (from within the standard libraries!) evade a naked 
> "rescue"? The current situation requires me to figure out everythign 
> that can possibly time out and add special-case error handling for it. 
> Worse than this, irb doesn't catch Timeout::Error and thus kills my 
> session (which typically has a bunch of state in it) whenever the http 
> server I'm talking to takes a while to respond.

As an aside, you'll likely want to take great care with which
parts of your code wrap with a Timeout.

I don't know if this has changed in 1.9, but in 1.8, a Timeout
can occur in such a way as to shortcut one or more statements
in an ensure block.

(Explanation with example case:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/msg/2c289a0c788483da )

In short: Don't wrap any code with a timeout { } that could
leave your program in a bad state if its ensure blocks were
skipped.  (Or the ensure blocks of any methods it calls, any
methods *they* call, etc., etc.)


Just FYI..


Regards,

Bill