`.execute_write(... block=True)` should be the default behaviour

[simonw]

Every single piece of code I've written against the write APIs has used the block=True option to wait for the result.

Without that, it instead fires the write into the queue but then continues even before it has finished executing.

block=True should clearly be the default behaviour here!

[simonw]

This is technically a breaking change, but a GitHub code search at https://cs.github.com/?scopeName=All+repos&scope=&q=execute_write%20datasette%20-owner%3Asimonw shows only one repo not-owned-by-me using this, and they're using block=True: https://github.com/mfa/datasette-webhook-write/blob/e82440f372a2f2e3ed27d1bd34c9fa3a53b49b94/datasette_webhook_write/__init__.py#L88-L89

[simonw]

The easiest way to change this would be to default to block=True such that you need to pass block=False to the APIs to have them do fire-and-forget.

An alternative would be to add new, separately named methods which do the fire-and-forget thing.

If I hadn't recently added execute_write_script and execute_write_many in #1570 I'd be more into this idea, but I don't want to end up with eight methods - execute_write, execute_write_queue, execute_write_many, execute_write_many_queue, execute_write_script, execute_write_scrript_queue, execute_write_fn, execute_write_fn_queue.

[simonw]

I'm going to go with execute_write(..., block=False) as the mechanism for fire-and-forget write queries.

[simonw]

Updated documentation: https://github.com/simonw/datasette/blob/00a2895cd2dc42c63846216b36b2dc9f41170129/docs/internals.rst#await-dbexecute_writesql-paramsnone-blocktrue

[simonw]

Re-opening this because I missed updating some of the docs, and I also need to update Datasette's own code to not use block=True in a bunch of places.

[simonw]

Updated docs for execute_write_fn(): https://github.com/simonw/datasette/blob/75153ea9b94d09ec3d61f7c6ebdf378e0c0c7a0b/docs/internals.rst#await-dbexecute_write_fnfn-blocktrue

[simonw]

All of those removed block=True lines in 8c401ee really help confirm to me that this was a good decision.