Ensure thread-safety

[trishankkarthik]

Presently, there is no thread-safety for some important things, such as:

• Switching tuf.conf global configuration variables between different TUF clients.
• Downloading the same target files with the same TUF client.

[JustinCappos]

I vote for a global lock for expediency.

On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 2:17 AM, TKK notifications@github.com wrote:

Presently, there is no thread-safety for some important things, such as:

• Switching tuf.conf global configuration variables between different
  TUF clients.
• Downloading the same target files with the same TUF client.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/akonst/tuf/issues/49
.

[trishankkarthik]

I wonder whether we would like to extend concurrence-safety to the repository tools (e.g. making a delegation).

Why would we want this? Well, suppose a developer wants to generate TUF metadata for tens of thousands of packages. It would be nice if she could parallelize her automation without worrying about whether the TUF repository tools would be concurrence-safe (e.g. ensuring that the parent/delegator metadata is safely updated).

Anyway, even if we wanted to do this, it would be at the end of our priority queue.

[lukpueh]

Quick fix: Note in the readme that TUF might behave unexpectedly when concurrently downloading from the same location to the same location.

[mnm678]

#972 added an explanation of this limitation to the readme.