semaphores and Rlocks

[Jive Dadson]

I've implemented a Condition class as described in the previous post. 
It uses a global wakeup service thread for timeouts.  That moves the
latency that results from time.sleeping from the case where there is a
notification to the case where there is a timeout.  It is similar in
semantics to the class Condition in module threading, with these
differences:

1.  It works with any thread created by thread.start_new_thread().  It
does not have or require a class Thread.  In fact it does not use module
threading at all.  It is my impression that you have to register your
thread in a class Thread object to use threading.Condition.  Correct me
if I'm wrong.

2.  If a wait() times out, it returns the timeout interval rather than
None. Otherwise the caller has no really good way of finding out.  I
doubt that would break anyone's code.

If you are interested, let me know.  See munged email address below
sig.  Naturally, the code is not ready for prime time.  In its present
form it is not a drop-in replacement for threading.Condition.  For one
thing, I have not implemented any entries other than acquire, wait,
notify, notifyAll, and release.  Some Python guru would need to polish
it up, looking for things like namespace polution and, well, not being a
Python guru, I don't know what else.

Jive

jdadson (at) ix (dot) netcom (dot) com