Re: User interaction from multiple threads

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > The idea expressed by several people is that once you start
  > interacting with some thread's prompt, the other threads are locked
  > out of interaction, until the interacting thread is done with the
  > series of prompts that allow it to go on with its business.

This might be ok if the thread's further prompts arrive in short
succession.  But what if it runs for 5 minutes and then asks
for input?  Should other threads be blocked for those 5 minutes?

I think the point of multiple threads is to avoid that.

Would a thread explicitly seize the terminal and hold it and
later release it?  Or would asking for input hold the terminal
until the thread exits?

  > If that's the first prompt in a series of prompts, we should fix the
  > prompt to tell what password does it ask for.

I don't think that is practical to do in all cases.  In some, yes.
But what if two threads run the same function?  The prompt could be
identical.

  > And even if we do require each thread to have a name, what guarantees
  > do we have that the name will be more informative than the prompts
  > about which you were worried?

If we tell people, "Give your thread a meaningful name if it is going
to ask for input", and we explain why, they will mostly do it.
When they don't, we can fix it.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)