EEP proposal - Automatic supervisor shutdown triggered by termination of significant childs

[Maria Scott]

Hi Michael,

>  I would prefer the normal option remain, but with a different name. I agree using the name "normal" would be confusing. However, the option should exist to mark a supervisor as part of a static supervision hierarchy. There should also be error checking to ensure child specs with significant set to true cause an error (the value doesn't get silently ignored). The error can be used as a return value for supervisor:start_child/2 and would block significant use where it is considered inappropriate (some supervisor processes would want to always exist as part of a static hierarchy).

Yes, I fully agree :)

>  I am not sure about a name instead of "normal" for the option. Alternative name ideas for the option are "default", "none", "static", "external".

Thanks for the suggestions, but I think they somewhat miss the point in one way or another ^^;

As I was already saying in my reply to José Valim, I think it might be better to rename the sup flag to something like "auto_shutdown", and rename "normal" to "never". This way, it would be clearer as to what the option refers (_automated_ shutdown, as opposed to shutdown of any sort), and "never" would be clearer in that it declares to _never_ do an _automated_ (self-) shutdown.

Kind regards,
    Maria Scott