[issue19465] selectors: provide a helper to choose a selector using constraints

[STINNER Victor]

New submission from STINNER Victor:

multiprocess, telnetlib (and subprocess in a near future, see #18923) use the following code to select the best selector:

# poll/select have the advantage of not requiring any extra file descriptor,
# contrarily to epoll/kqueue (also, they require a single syscall).
if hasattr(selectors, 'PollSelector'):
    _TelnetSelector = selectors.PollSelector
else:
    _TelnetSelector = selectors.SelectSelector

I don't like the principle of "a default selector", selectors.DefaultSelector should be removed in my opinion.

I would prefer a function returning the best selector using constraints. Example:

def get_selector(use_fd=True) -> BaseSelector:
  ...

By default, it would return the same than the current DefaultSelector. But if you set use_fd=False, the choice would be restricted to select() or poll().

I don't want to duplicate code like telnetlib uses in each module, it's harder to maintain. The selectors module may get new selectors in the future, see for example #18931.

Except use_fd, I don't have other ideas of constraints. I read somewhere that differenet selectors may have different limits on the number of file descriptors. I don't know if it's useful to use such constraint?

----------
messages: 201855
nosy: gvanrossum, haypo, neologix
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: selectors: provide a helper to choose a selector using constraints
versions: Python 3.4

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