[erlang-questions] supervisor started from gen_server

[Mazen Harake]

Of course you *can* but the point I'm trying to make is that it's not
"wrong" to do it like I did and it doesn't break OTP behaviour and is
actually convenient. Doing it like I did eliminates all the clean up code I
have to make when starting and stopping when the supervisor is "parallel"
rather than "under" my client process.

As I said, in general you wouldn't want to do it like that but you *can* and
it isn't *wrong* and it isn't a *hack*. The Erlang documentation doesn't
(AFAIK) bring up this scenario but it doesn't make it less useful.

That is all.

On 20 May 2011 13:52, Kannan <vasdeveloper@REDACTED> wrote:

> Mazen,
>
> You can do the same thing with simple_one_for_one supervisors, one_for_all
> supervisors and one_for_one supervisors stacked in different levels.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Mazen Harake <mazen.harake@REDACTED>wrote:
>
>> I don't agree with the "never" part. There are corner cases and I would,
>> in general, absolutely agree with what you wrote but here is one example of
>> an exception.
>>
>> In my IRC library (https://github.com/mazenharake/eirc) I have the
>> following scenario:
>>
>> One can create 1..n clients. Each client is a process (running a
>> gen_server in eirc_cl.erl). A client can have many processes associated with
>> it, in my case these are called Bots. Each bot is started and supervised by
>> a client. A bot shall not terminate unless told to do so (gracefully) or if
>> the parent dies (i.e the client). Now if I manually start a supervisor
>> instance inside the gen_server I can simply make use of the supervisor
>> functionality without handling any of that in my gen_server. I can add and
>> remove children (bots) dynamically from my supervisor I.e. I don't have to
>> maintain my own list of them and when I (the client) exits my children (I.e.
>> the supervisor) will exit and thus my bots will exit... all according to OTP
>> principals and I don't need to catch exit signals. This makes it REALLY easy
>> to clean up things since all I have to do is to close the client process,
>> the client process doesn't even need logic in the terminate callback since
>> the children will exit with the same reason. If my supervisor was "on the
>> outside" (like you suggest and which it normally is) I would have to make
>> sure to clean up after myself with the supervisor.
>>
>> So it is much simpler (from an isolation point of view) to (in my case)
>> start a supervisor Inside the gen_server.
>>
>> never say never ;)
>>
>> /M
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 18 May 2011 14:13, Vance Shipley <vances@REDACTED> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 11:38:50AM +0200, Roberto Ostinelli wrote:
>>> }  just a quick question: can you think of any case in which starting a
>>> }  supervisor from a gen_server would actually be a perfectly fit idea?
>>>
>>> Never.
>>>
>>>                      +---------+
>>>                      | foo_sup |
>>>                      +-+-----+-+
>>>                       /       \
>>>           +----------+--+   +--+---------+
>>>           | bar_sup_sup |   | foo_server |
>>>           +---+---------+   +------------+
>>>               |
>>>          +----+----+
>>>          | bar_sup |
>>>          +---------+
>>>
>>> Start a supervisor for the new dynamic supervisor(s) and use
>>> supervisor:start_child/2 from the gen_server to start it.
>>>
>>> --
>>>         -Vance
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> erlang-questions mailing list
>>> erlang-questions@REDACTED
>>> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>>>
>>
>>
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>
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