[PyX-devel] Re: Some comments on PyX

[Andre W. <wo...@us...>]

Fernando,

On 16.10.03, Fernando Perez wrote:
> Again, this is an issue of balancing robustness vs convenience.  I 
> understand your concerns about not making it overly long.  I'd suggest that 
> 30 seconds still sounds reasonable to me, but that's open to debate.  
> However, there's a very simple solution which perhaps will make everyone 
>  happy: you can have a long timeout by default (say 30 seconds), and an 
> internal timeout (harcoded to 5 seconds).  The code waits for the internal 
> timeouts, and every time that expires it prints a warning:
> 
> *** PyX INFO: still waiting for latex after 5 seconds...
> *** PyX INFO: still waiting for latex after 10 seconds...
> *** PyX INFO: still waiting for latex after 15 seconds...
> ...
> *** PyX ERROR: the timeout of 30 seconds expired and latex did not respond. 
> Aborting.
> 
> This way you give your users feedback, and the system will be much more 
> robust in the face of slow networks or fresh latex installations which will 
> need to build many fonts in a first pass.

This is a really good suggestion. I've just implemented it in CVS now.
I've choosen the following timeout defaults:

        waitfortex=60
        showwaitfortex=5

This should help for most cases while not making to much trouble to
anyone ... I like it.


André

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