[erlang-questions] supervisor_bridge enhancement

[Lennart Öhman]

Hi Serge,
I believe you have to high expectations on the supervisor_bridge. It was once developed when OTP was new to accommodate the (then) usual situation that there was non-OTP-compliant code that needed to be ran in a supervision tree. So the superviso_bridge was only meant to handle the OTP-system-message communication between two supervisors. Today there should rarely be any need to use the supervisor_bridge.

Best regards
Lennart

-----Original Message-----
From: erlang-questions-bounces@REDACTED [mailto:erlang-questions-bounces@REDACTED] On Behalf Of Serge Aleynikov
Sent: den 24 maj 2008 17:41
To: Erlang Users' List
Subject: [erlang-questions] supervisor_bridge enhancement

Currently the supervisor_bridge behavior doesn't expose
Mod:handle_call/3 and Mod:handle_info/3 callbacks.  When using this behavior to provide custom startup for some application's server (such as inets' httpd) I frequently find it lacking the ability to report a Pid of the bridged child or provide handling of custom messages.

Attached is a prototype of supervisor_bridge extension that adds a new function get_child_pid/1, as well as new callbacks Mod:handle_call/3, Mod:handle_cast/2, and handle_info/2.

Some possible applications of this module could be to implement:
a. timed instantiation of the bridged Pid (e.g. run the bridged module only between certain hours of a day).
b. registration of the bridged Pid of a 3rd party server (if it doesn't register itself).

It would be nice if this supervisor_bridge extension could make it to the distribution.

Serge