Support daemon threads.

[acertain]

Daemon threads stop when all non-daemon threads have stopped: http://docs.python.org/2/library/threading.html#threading.Thread.daemon It would be nice to be able to mark actors as daemon.

[jodal]

To better understand the use case:

1. Is this something you want for a few or all actors?
2. If you only want it for a few actors, what kind of tasks are those actors typically doing? What's the difference between them and the non-daemon actors?
3. Are you okay with on_stop() being called when a single "daemon" actor is stopped, but on_stop() not being called when the actor shuts down because all non-daemon threads are done?
4. What kind of workarounds, if any, are you currently using?

[acertain]

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 2:29 AM, Stein Magnus Jodal <notifications@github.com

wrote:
To better understand the use case:

1. Is this something you want for a few or all actors?
   All actors, because I am only using a few.
2. If you only want it for a few actors, what kind of tasks are those
   actors typically doing? What's the difference between them and the
   non-daemon actors?
   Tasks like logging with SMTP.
3. Are you okay with on_stop() being called when a single "daemon" actor
   is stopped, but on_stop() not being called when the actor shuts down
   because all non-daemon threads are done?
   I think so.
4. What kind of workarounds, if any, are you currently using?
   Calling my program in a separate file with

try:
from app import app
app.main()
finally:
import pykka
pykka.ActorRegistry.stop_all()

[jodal]

I just added support for using daemon threads. Could you give it a spin and see if it works for you before I release v1.1?

You can install the development version either by installing from the git repo or running pip install pykka==dev.

[jodal]

I might add that to make a ThreadingActor use a daemon thread, you should set the self.use_daemon_thread = True on the actor before start() is called. Example:

class AnActor(pykka.ThreadingActor):
    use_daemon_thread = True
    ...

AnActor.start()