[Python-Dev] Is thread-safe smtpd desired/possible? (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Tue May 21 19:43:32 CEST 2013

On Tue, 21 May 2013 18:50:23 +0200, Sorin Stelian <sorin.stelian at axis.com> wrote:

I am posting this here since I could find no active maintainer of the smtpd module.

Currently I am effectively the maintainer of that module, though other people are helping out.

In my work as a test engineer for Axis (www.axis.com) I encountered the need of having thread-safe SMTP servers. I know the use case of several SMTP servers running in concurrent threads might seem odd, but it can actually be quite useful for testing purposes.

I have implemented (for my own use) a possible solution which basically means that every SMTP channel has its own socket map, instead of using asyncore's global socket map. It would not involve any change in asyncore. Looking at the disucssion from http://bugs.python.org/issue11959 it seems to me that such a solution would not be accepted. Do you think that modifying asyncore is more feasible? If not, is this something that might be looked at? I can provide code if needed, but I would first like to know your thoughts about this.

I don't think issue 11959 represents a categorical rejection of improvements here; however, I suspect that tulip has an impact on this.

Regardless of that, any changes need to be discussed in a wider context than just the smtpd module, no matter where changes are actually made.

--David

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