[PD] pd and tcp: what to do against crashes?

[Martin Peach]

Roman Haefeli wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-02-23 at 21:03 +0000, Martin Peach wrote:
>> OK I fixed it now in svn. It works on debian. The select() call was not 
>> being done properly. Now I need to test it on Windows again.
> 
> hey, many thanks! it works. now i wonder, what happens, if the message
> is triggered: 'tcpserver_send_buf: client 1 not writeable'. does that
> indicated, that the buffer is cleared? does it mean, that when this
> message appears, that at least one message didn't come through?
> 

Right now it means that the message is dropped. I can't see a way of 
holding on to it that wouldn't end up crashing Pd eventually if you keep 
sending to an unconnected client.

> somehow i need to design netpd in way, that as soon as one single
> message is lost, the connection should be shut down and established
> again, and the client should then again sync with other clients.
> otherwise very bad things could happen (patches are not transmitted
> completely and loading incomplete patches causes pd crashing). 
> 

Well the easiest thing would be to have [tcpserver] close the connection 
itself when that happens. The next best would be to have it output a 
message on a 'status' outlet that you could use to close the connection.

> before the change i could be sure, that either all messages came through
> or the server crashed at some point, if messages could not be delivered.
> now, since the server doesn't crash anymore, i need to know, if messages
> were dropped. how can i know?
> 

At the moment it prints to the Pd window, which isn't much use for 
control purposes. As I said, for me the easiest and most logical thing 
is to have the connection closed automatically, but then you have to 
keep track of the connection count to know whether it happened.
What do you think?

Martin