no current thread warning

[Aahz Maruch]

In article <t3ks6hg7c7rgae at corp.supernews.com>,
Charles Crain <ccrain at austin.rr.com> wrote:
>
>Near as I can tell, this relates to the statement in the documentation for
>the threading.currentThread() function, which states something to the effect
>of "for threads not created by the threading module, a dummy thread with
>limited capabilities will be created."
>
>A have a couple questions regarding this:
>1.  Exactly how are the capabilities limited?  Are there any gotchas I
>should be on the lookout for?

If you look in threading.py, you'll see this:

# Dummy thread class to represent threads not started here.
# These aren't garbage collected when they die,
# nor can they be waited for.
# Their purpose is to return *something* from currentThread().
# They are marked as daemon threads so we won't wait for them
# when we exit (conform previous semantics).

Essentially, they're kept track of so Python *doesn't* try to do
anything with them.

>2.  Why is the warning printed out unconditionally?  IMHO, it should only be
>printed out if the error is potentially fatal, and/or amounts to an asserion
>failure within the interpreter.  If I interpret the dox correctly, this
>message could at best be considered an informational, and should therefore
>be able to be turned off.  It is only cosmetic, but in considering whether
>to commercially release products we have written in Python, it is an issue.

Again, if you look in threading.py, you'll see that there's an __debug__
test that fails if you do "python -O".  In fact, there are several such
locations within threading.py.
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