Re: [RFC] automatically retrying network connections

[Jimmy Yuen Ho Wong <wyuenho@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 9:06 PM, Robert Pluim <rpluim@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> one of the consequences of asking the user questions during network
> connection setup is that the server they're trying to connect to might
> have decided to close the connection by the time they've finished
> answering.
>
> This suggests that there should be an option to retry the connection
> in such a situation. I have a trial implementation involving a new
> parameter to open-network-stream to request retrying, but was
> wondering if it might not be better if it was a globally enabled
> default. Iʼll note that various browsers retry failing connections
> automatically.
>
> Thanks
>
> Robert
>

I have a related but different issue, and I think I'm looking at a
different solution from an option that automatically retries at layer
4.

The OCSP RFC I'm implementing specifies a response status type
`tryLater`, this is on layer 7. What I really need is some kind of
promise/future primitive or await async built into Emacs so I don't
have to block the other OCSP requests that I need to make while I'm
waiting for a good answer for this one, or worse, block the UI. I'm
currently using generators to alleviate UI blocking a bit, but I
haven't found a good answer to making async network processes and then
joining their results later. (short of writing a giant block of
callback spagetti anyway...)

P.S. Thanks a lot for exposing `getaddrinfo`, I haven't tried it out
yet. I'll get it ASAP.