[naviserver-devel] ns_atstartup and order of execution?

[Zoran V. <zv...@ar...>]

Hi !

We have a pretty elaborate (and sometimes confusing) mechanism
for running various atXXX scripts.

So, if I would like to:

   ns_atstartup X
   ns_atstartup Y
   ns_atstartup Z

then the server will execute:

   Z
   Y
   X

i.e. in the *reverse* order. This is because all of those
are just entered in a single-linked list and the head of
the list points always to the *last* registered item.

This is suboptimal.

In many real world scenarios, I will like to use the ns_atstartup
to schedule couple of scripts to do various initialization things.
It is often so that Y will depend on X and Z on Y to be successfull.
At the moment, I'm (mis)using the ns_job with a single thread and
post the jobs there, because it will then exectue them in FIFO fashion
(which is what I need). BUT: this is of course not optimal as it runs
parallely with the server startup and I have to be carefull to  
accomodate
for that.

So, I'm all for reversing the logic of script execution i.e. doing the
more natural way of runing them in FIFO fashion (now we have LIFO).
But, I'm afraid of the potential compatibility problems. What I would
like to see is if any of you would have objections to reversing the
logic, and if yes, ideas how we could make this compatible?
One idea would be:

    ns_atXXX ?-tail? $theScript

I'd rather go after FIFO list walk then adding yet-another-option,
but I'm open to suggestions...

Cheers
Zoran