How to kill a thread from another thread ?

[Richard Gruet]

Aahz Maruch wrote:

> In article <3A0A6715.35C19F47 at ina.fr>, Richard Gruet  <rgruet at ina.fr> wrote:
> >
> >Does someone know how to kill a Python thread from another Python
> >thread (in the same process) ?
>
> You don't.  You need to set up each of your threads so that they look
> for some kind of signal to kill themselves (which means returning).  It
> has been argued that the ability to kill threads is necessary for server
> applications, but I haven't seen any powerful arguments in favor of that.

Actually, I'm using a thread to execute a function call asynchronously, to avoid
getting stuck is something goes wrong. To execute the call, I create a thread and
delegate the actual function call to it. Then, in the main thread, I wait for the
end of the thread (ie the return of the function called) with a timeout (using a
join).
The problem is that if a timeout occurs because the function doesn't return, I
have no way to kill the thread and sometimes it appears to prevent the program to
exit correctly (it hangs because there is still living threads).

Richard