ApplicationCommunicator cancels the application future unnecessarily?

[fish-face]

I am referring to this part of the receive_output method:

            else:
                self.future.cancel()
                try:
                    await self.future
                except asyncio.CancelledError:
                    pass

What I have experienced is that if you, in a test, call receive_output when there is none available, you not only get a TimeoutError, but you cannot catch that exception and proceed, because the whole application has been cancelled; any further attempts to receive output, or even reconnect the communicator, will fail with CancelledError.

There is a question mark in the title because I certainly do not know if this is necessary in some other circumstance! But I don't see a reason to do this, hence raising an issue.

Assuming there is a reason for this then it may help to have some context on why I would want to receive_output when none is available: it's handy when you don't actually know how much output you're expecting, because you can do something like:

outputs = []
while True:
    outputs.append(await communicator.receive_output())
...

Of course, there are checks that one could perform to see whether output is available; but maybe there's no need to. If there is a need, my tests are actually synchronous so performing them is more annoying and costly than it might seem :P

[andrewgodwin]

At this point I don't recall why that's there; I can only presume my past self had some reasoning, but I don't know at this point and I'd have to go spend a few hours re-learning that specific code to see if there is something.

It's possible this was more necessary in prior Python versions, too; async in the 3.6 era needed a lot more workarounds.

[fish-face]

Well this was the commit which added it daebab1 - don't know if you already checked that :P

I guess what I was hoping to understand was something a bit more general, though 6 years ago is a long time even for that - whether there was an underlying assumption that if you timed out waiting for output that ought to be fatal, and if so any rationale or anything around that.

I do notice from looking at that commit a second time that the same change is performed in wait() and in receive_output() - to me this makes more sense because you were waiting for the task to finish anyway. So maybe the behaviour could've been transferred to the receive_output case? But, my first assumption would still have been that you could wait with a timeout and then the task should be left alone if the timeout elapses.

[andrewgodwin]

Yes, I'm afraid that a one line commit message from 6 years ago does not restore my memory in this particular case. If you can prove it's not needed via some tests or something, I'd be happy to remove it.