Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Add non-blocking version of PQcancel

Hi Jelte,

I had a look into your patchset (v16), did a quick review and played a
bit with the feature.

Patch 2 is missing the documentation about PQcancelSocket() and contains
a few typos; please find attached a (fixup) patch to correct these.

--- a/src/interfaces/libpq/libpq-fe.h
+++ b/src/interfaces/libpq/libpq-fe.h
@@ -321,16 +328,28 @@ extern PostgresPollingStatusType PQresetPoll(PGconn *conn);
/* Synchronous (blocking) */
extern void PQreset(PGconn *conn);

+/* issue a cancel request */
+extern PGcancelConn * PQcancelSend(PGconn *conn);
[...]

Maybe I'm missing something, but this function above seems a bit
strange. Namely, I wonder why it returns a PGcancelConn and what's the
point of requiring the user to call PQcancelStatus() to see if something
got wrong. Maybe it could be defined as:

int PQcancelSend(PGcancelConn *cancelConn);

where the return value would be status? And the user would only need to
call PQcancelErrorMessage() in case of error. This would leave only one
single way to create a PGcancelConn value (i.e. PQcancelConn()), which
seems less confusing to me.

Jelte Fennema wrote:
> Especially since I ran into another use case that I would want to use
> this patch for recently: Adding an async cancel function to Python
> it's psycopg3 library. This library exposes both a Connection class
> and an AsyncConnection class (using python its asyncio feature). But
> one downside of the AsyncConnection type is that it doesn't have a
> cancel method.

As part of my testing, I've implemented non-blocking cancellation in
Psycopg, based on v16 on this patchset. Overall this worked fine and
seems useful; if you want to try it:

https://github.com/dlax/psycopg3/tree/pg16/non-blocking-pqcancel

(The only thing I found slightly inconvenient is the need to convey the
connection encoding (from PGconn) when handling error message from the
PGcancelConn.)

Cheers,
Denis