How to force a thread to stop

[Paul Rubin]

bryanjugglercryptographer at yahoo.com writes:
> > Have you looked at POSH yet?   http://poshmodule.sf.net
> 
> Paul, have you used POSH? Does it work well? Any major gotchas?

I haven't used it.  I've been wanting to try.  I've heard it works ok
in Linux but I've heard of problems with it under Solaris.

Now that I understand what the OP is trying to do, I think POSH is
overkill, and just using pipes or sockets is fine.  If he really wants
to use shared memory, hmmm, there used to be an shm module at

 http://mambo.peabody.jhu.edu/omr/omi/source/shm_source/shm.html

but that site now hangs (and it's not on archive.org), and Python's
built-in mmap module doesn't support any type of locks.  

I downloaded the above shm module quite a while ago, so if I can find
it I might upload it to my own site.  It was a straightforward
interface to the Sys V shm calls (also *nix-only, I guess).  I guess
he also could use mmap with no locks, but with separate memory regions
for reading and writing in each subprocess, using polling loops.  I
sort of remember Apache's mod_mmap doing something like that if it has
to.

To really go off the deep end, there are a few different MPI libraries
with Python interfaces.

> I looked at the paper... well, not all 200+ pages, but I checked
> how they handle a couple parts that I thought hard and they
> seem to have good ideas.

200 pages??  The paper I read was fairly short, and I looked at the
code (not too carefully) and it seemed fairly straightforward.  Maybe
I missed something, or am not remembering; it's been a while.

> I didn't find the SourceForge project
> so promising. The status is alpha, the ToDo's are a little scary,
> and project looks stalled.  Also it's *nix only.

Yeah, using it for anything serious would involve being willing to fix
problems with it as they came up.  But I think the delicate parts of
it are parts that aren't that important, so I'd just avoid using
those.